by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Brenda Yanez, Samantha Laurenti, Greg Sestero
Intro:
The camera tricks, the pacing, the supposed-to-be-menacing grinning stares; we’ve seen this all before.
Aussie expat director Robert Livings has been on a tear lately. From his start with the chilling Stephen King adaptation Cain Rose Up, to stories of isolated couples breaking apart in Weekend Healer and The Other Girl (the latter a great example of mumblecore cringe comedy), to his more recent found footage work with Infrared and The Christmas Tapes. While his skill with blunt force social anxiety has served him well throughout, his pivot towards horror has had some growing pains, but nothing that a well-placed Greg Sestero couldn’t smooth over. And now, Livings and his microbudget partner Randy Nundlall Jr. are back with another found footage horror anthology.
Like The Christmas Tapes, the framing device for the various shorts is akin to a bootleg V/H/S, with two friends (Brenda Yanez and Samantha Laurenti) looking through the belongings of their recently-deceased friend and finding a bunch of VHS tapes… that appear to be starring them. It’s a decent wraparound for the film overall, even if the gnarled scratchings about ‘Mr. Magpie’ aren’t all that intriguing (real Bye Bye Man vibes), but it shows Rob & Randy continuing to feel their way around the decomposed flesh of the sub-genre.
Not that this is all that adventurous, especially in the first half. The shorts ‘Ouija’ and ‘Possession’… well, you can probably guess what they’re about, and between the obnoxious performances and the rote treatment of their central ghouls, it can feel like a prolonged explanation for why the mainstream largely left found footage behind in favour of the formalism behind ‘elevated horror’. Considering how full-on weird Christmas Tapes turned out, with its eerily recognisable Aussie sense of humour, it’s strange that this isn’t stranger.
Thankfully, the second half picks things up a bit. ‘Grief’ finds another interesting avenue for found footage in the form of a therapy session that asks interesting questions about where psychology and parapsychology chafe against each other, but the main star here is ‘Sacred Redemption Order’, about the titular cult and its impact on the Internet. The mocked-up vlog footage is convincing, and even includes a cameo from Doug Walker (a key influence on a whole generation of YouTube film riffers, and quite the infamous filmmaker in his own right), and once we get to the SRO ranch, the duelling camera crews make for a nice visualisation of how groups like these attempt to control the media narrative, like a handheld take on Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism.
But that boost in overall quality is still minor, as the overall production latches onto a lot of old tropes in found footage horror (albeit with a thankful absence of characters just jump-scaring each other for laughs, which is just lame), and even taking the microbudget into account, the film craft for the individual segments doesn’t offer much in the way of atmosphere and tension. It certainly looks good for what it is, and the wraparound segments are well composed, but it’s as if Rob & Randy are starting to stall after the appreciative flexibility that they showed going from Infrared to The Christmas Tapes. Then again, maybe it’s just because Greg isn’t showing back up as Geoff the Owner’s Manual, the MVP of the aforementioned films (he gets a brief cameo here as himself but that’s it).
Conjuring Tapes has interesting ideas and shows a willingness to play around with the found footage format, but only to a point. For the most part, it feels like a remnant of the days when Paranormal Activity was the biggest name in horror. The camera tricks, the pacing, the supposed-to-be-menacing grinning stares; we’ve seen this all before. And coming from two directors who have already shown their stripes as genuine contenders in the microbudget market (once again, Christmas Tapes is really fun, and The Other Girl gets a very strong recommendation), it’s all rather disappointing. With how prolific they’ve been in the last few years, no doubt they’re already working on something else, but here’s hoping it hits closer to the mark than this.
