Director: John Erick Dowdle
Writers: John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle
Rated: R (violence)
Original release date: 2007
Cast: Ben Messmer, Stacy Chbosky, Lou George

To kick off October 2010, I continue my new tradition of reviewing as much horror as possible. Sadly, we’re not off to a very good start with The Poughkeepsie Tapes.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes

This movie is presented in the form of a documentary covering the brutal killings of a sadistic serial killer who’s stalked New York and Pennsylvania, dubbed as the Water Street Butcher. Investigators discover a collection of video tapes in the killer’s previous residence which depict the graphic encounters of his slayings. The majority of the film goes back and forth between the torture footage and interviews with law enforcement, members of victims, and other experts.

I loved the idea behind this movie. Its goal is to bring us into the mind of a serial killer and give us a first hand look at the terrifying events of such cases. I had high hopes for this one, mainly after a fellow movie reviewer had mentioned something about this one being an actual “scary” movie. For me this was only partially true. The film ended up being scary in that these types of tragedies occur often, and the thought that something like this could hit close to home is quite scary. As far as the movie itself goes, it tries too hard with too little and does not quite prevail.

Let’s start with the tapes themselves. These are what really hold the “scares” of the film. The quality is horrendous, at times barely watchable. Now, I get that this is supposed to be on a cheap camera owned by the killer and the quality declined after poor storage…but this is a movie after all and I think they went overboard simulating the poor quality. The second issue with the tapes is that creepy music and effects are dubbed over them. If this were a documentary, why would they change anything with actual footage? And finally, the overuse of loud white noise during switches between tape footage was extremely annoying.

There’s also the issue of the acting. For the most part, it was pretty bad. I will not take too many points off for this for a few reasons though. For one, it’s supposed to be a documentary and the majority of the interviewees I’m guessing were not actors. What saved the otherwise bad acting though was the acting of the serial killer (Messmer) and his main victim Cheryl (Stacy Chbosky). When I could get passed the bad video footage, the scenarios on tape were fairly believable and hard to watch in some scenes.

Overall I was disappointed. The film did have a lot of potential, but like I said I think it tried too hard to scare and shock which took away from the real scariness the film could have had. It did a good job with the “tapes” portion minus the effects flaws, and the interviews aside from some of the almost comical scenes gave it a believable touch. The problem was that the final product as a whole was not believable for me. I can imagine the movie would be scary and hard to watch, for women especially, and in that regard the film is effective. But its final presentation did not really leave me with any consistent feeling.

The Dowdle brothers certainly have potential. Their rendition of Quarentine was a faithful and equally chilling remake of the Spanish horror phenomenon [REC] and I’ve heard nothing but good things about Devil from this year. Perhaps this film was a good learning process for them as it did have some good things going for it which showed their skills, but fell short of what it could have been.
IMDb/trailer

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