Daylight

I keep a personal movie inventory where I rank movies and categorize them in good, average, and bad buckets. Daylight has the honor of being at the very bottom of my bad category (and I like found footage films), even behind a flick called "Primal Rage" that makes Bigfoot an archer(!) That's saying something.

I'm still curious why it took so long for this genre to take off. Blair Witch seemed to have opened the door for cheap (even cheaper than usual) horror movie making. Whatever the case, I'm not a big fan of that craze. Still the movie although it has many flaws (acting being one of the major ones, clichés and bad shots some of the others), is somewhat enticing and has tension when needed.

It almost takes really off during the last third of the movie (even if it seems to change pace in between), but it also gets tangled up in some mysterious threads that might not be as obvious as you have thought at the beginning of the movie. So it is complex, but maybe not in a good way (Eye of the Beholder). If it weren't for going that different route, I think I would've given it a lesser rating, but maybe you'll feel different. It's a strange movie, keep that in the back of your mind

What a mess this movie was! I am almost at a loss for words. How do I even describe this movie?? Let's see....a super slow set up, about 10 different plot lines by the end including - paranormal elements, time travel, abused children, emotional trauma, murder, teleportation.. all culminating to a end that was nothing but people screaming, running around the various locations they teleport to, doors slamming, and camera interference, all of which lead to nothing. This movie tried so damn hard to do something different, but we were left with way too many plot developments, none of which get resolved. If this review sounds like a mess, it's simply because I am trying to describe the worst movie I have seen all year. Mind bending amounts of awfulness here. Oh, and the acting was horrible. At one point the camera guy actually whines "Oh man! Not again!!" after being teleported to a different location.

"Daylight" is another tedious entry in the micro-budget, c-horror "found footage" sub-genre. I happen to really enjoy these kinds of films and have viewed and reviewed many dozens of them over the last couple of years. This one is, unfortunately pretty typical of majority of these weekend-shoot videos. The acting is what you'd expect from a community college drama course and is often distractingly worse (the kind of acting that makes it seem like they are reading from the script for the first time). This makes it difficult to watch this one all the way through (esp as it just seemed to drone on and on...), but I think to review a film, you need to watch it all the way, just to be fair. Anyway, there were ZERO SCARES (in fact, nothing even remotely interesting in that regard - it was almost like a very long, very bland documentary instead of a horror film), and the plot was the standard dull fare for a supernatural/"demonic" storyline. I think the writers and directors intended some kind of psychological component but couldn't quite decide what kind of film they wanted to make. There's no mystery to the story, no intellectual subtext - it's just a haphazard effort that lacked cohesion and any kind of suspense- building on any level, ultimately. So, unfortunately, I wasted $5 on this rental (which is actually a pretty high price of admission when compared to most other films in this sub-genre on Amazon Instant) - which is a lot to throw away on a rental. Hopefully, this review will save you some money and time, as I definitely can't recommend this one. Really the only positives for this one are the use of quite good editing software (if heavily overused, esp with regard to the usual "found footage" camera flutters and video distortion) and graphics, high quality HD cameras, they did provide at least a full-length movie (though again that was a plus and a minus), the lack of tedious background music (so common to these kinds of films) and some kinda cool DVD cover artwork, which actually sold me on renting this clunker. I just want to save the viewing public from wasting their money, despite the phony reviews posted by family and friends of the filmmakers eager to earn some of their investment back.

DAYLIGHT starts off like many other found footage movies, with a person narrating after-the-fact on several deaths and disappearances that happened around a house; followed by the showing of footage found on location.

However, what starts off as a deceptively simple story about a high school girl for whom a team of three child protective services workers is investigating the possibility of child abuse sprawls out in multiple directions, so that by the time everything is said and done, the plot subsumes stories concerning each of the three members of the CPS team, involving three separate priests and three different girls, their families and one boy, all centered on demonic possession.

Apparently, the original cut was three hours long, and it does not surprise me at all. The released cut, about half as long, compresses all the different plotlines to such an extent that I dare anyone to make sense of the plot on first viewing.

The matter is not helped by the fact that in the second half the pace becomes noticeably more hectic and confusing due to intermixing of different footage and various distortion effects. It is done to such an extent that it makes me wonder whether the film-makers tried to confuse the audience on purpose.

Since this mitigated my enjoyment of the movie, I was getting ready to give the film a low rating, despite the decent production values and acting.

But then, during the last 15 minutes, the movie suddenly went into an unexpected high-paced quasi-surrealistic tour de force, which led me to revise my view positively.

The final 15-minute sequence does not really clear up matters and may even introduce new confusions, but when it is just taken in as a sort of rapid-fire "stream of consciousness" procession of events without worrying too much about what it all means, it actually becomes quite enjoyable. At any rate, it is not like the audience was not already told at the beginning what will happen to all these people.

So this is a found footage movie that I think can be quite polarizing. I ended up kind of liking it overall, but I can understand the view of those who hate it with a passion.