As Above, So Below (dir. John Erick Dowdle, 2014)
I should like a movie in which Ginsberg from Mad Men has alchemical misadventures in the Paris Catacombs much more than this. What went wrong here?
The improbably named Perdita Weeks stars as the improbably named Scarlett Marlowe, the standard young, beautiful, and athletic academic that the genre demands [1]. She’s obsessed with alchemy, but in a way that I don’t find endearing, like Blaise on Lodge 49. She enlists her ex-boyfriend George (Ben Feldman) and a team of people played by actors I don’t recognize to seek out the philosopher’s stone that Nicolas Flamel hid in the Catacombs of Paris. There they encounter cultists, demons, and such. There are many problems for them, but the cameras keep working throughout.
Found footage horror exists as a genre largely because digital video is cheap and with the right marketing campaign you basically can’t lose money. You have high points like The Blair Witch Project and REC, and then you have utterly worthless films like The Devil Inside. As Above, So Below is something in the middle. The most interesting thing about the film is that it was shot on location in the Catacombs of Paris. However, this creates its own problems. You can’t bring in much equipment or very many props, forcing the actors to rely on their imaginations before the digital effects can be put it. As far as I know, this style of acting has not been properly incorporated into the Meisner technique or the Method, but a solid decade of Marvel movies and all those Avatar films in development might bring the art a more formalized approach than “Look at the tennis ball on the stick and pretend.”
[1] Just once, give me a movie starring a harried, out-of-shape archaeology adjunct who has a harder time securing funding than actually finding the ancient relic.
oliveresque 