My Little Eye (DVD)

...you may want to discredit My Little Eye as a bog standard gimmicky horror movie, thanks to the attention lavished by the press on its fixation with using fixed cameras to capture the action. Will you want to punch it in its pudgy chops? Depends on your level of tolerance for the familiar…

***YER BASIC PLOT***

Cash, the driving factor in many a greedy whelp’s mind, has tempted a group of 5 (3 men, 2 women) to a secluded, ...
...up saving people’s necks? In My Little Eye this actually works – these people are all in need of the cash, and so when desperation kicks in due to a worsening of the situation, they will do anything to try and keep the group together and win the cash. Not knowing which way they will turn due to the lack of real character information means the story teeters on that aforementioned knife’s edge. And in true great horror movie tradition, the actors are ... more

Familiarity – it can breed contempt you know. A logistical nightmare – quite how an adverb can produce a noun from its theoretical noun is quite simply making an incredibly laboured joke out of an idiom. Have I lost you yet? ‘Cause I sure as hell have lost myself…let’s begin again…with less clever-trying.

Familiarity breeds contempt. The more Metallica videos I see, I get reminded of the fact that they threw a hissy fit over Napster and that James Hetfield’s face is getting to the right level of pudginess for it to be satisfying to punch. Similarly, you may want to discredit My Little Eye as a bog standard gimmicky horror movie, thanks to the attention lavished by the press on its fixation with using fixed cameras to capture the action. Will you want to punch it in its pudgy chops? Depends on your level of tolerance for the familiar…

***YER BASIC PLOT***

Cash, the driving factor in many a greedy whelp’s mind, has tempted a group of 5 (3 men, 2 women) to a secluded, snow-covered, middle-of-nowhere cabin. They are tasked with living in the house for 6 months, obeying curfews and never leaving. The fun is all being captured by webcams, which fill every inch of the house and are mounted outside too, so no move goes uncaptured. The prize for sticking with the rules is a cool $1 million each – and the only other rule to remember is that if one person should leave, not a one of them will get a dime.

The first 5 months and 3 weeks are flash-forwarded past in split-screen/quad-screen mini clips, until we drop in on the housemates during their final week. They seem pretty bored and very used to the schedules and routines imposed upon them by the manipulators of the webcam broadcast. Then things start to take a turn for the nasty, as personal secrets begin to crop up that bring uneasy feelings to the minds and stomachs of the quintet. As the menace becomes steadily more graphic, paranoia takes a hold of the contestants, until they begin to question not only each other, but also what is part of the game any more…

* * * * *

You have to blame it all on the Blair Witch phenomena really. Just think of all the tired excuses for horror movies that have tried to base themselves around a flashy concept whilst still retaining the clichés typical to the slasher genre. Most notable is Hallowe’en: Resurrection, which decides to have Michael Myers stalk a fresh bunch of meat on a live webcam broadcast. The internet does NOT equal “cutting edge”! Still, this is the way horror movies have always been, and whilst it might seem staid and predictable to have movies based around mobile phones (Scream) or any recent technology (See: Resident Evil for its pointless “killer computer” system), tapping into things that seem familiar and safe is the best way to build on fear. Reality TV is all around us, so what better to base a horror flick on? We have become so desensitised to “real life” shows that we flick past them as if nothing special. This movie realises that and asks “what next?” in much the same way as The Running Man predicted a growing lust for violence in game shows.

***WEB OF INTRIGUE***

What will you take away from this movie that will make you want to clutch it to your bosom and call it Maurice? Well, it too embraces things – it embraces the stock and trade shocks of any horror movie – unexpected animals, loud noises as people dart in front of the camera and night-vision (best use of it since Silence of the Lambs) within a modern setting. Part of its genius lies in the slow burn nature of the story – for some this may well equal boredom – which begins with cosiness and levity and drifts ever so slightly down, like blood dripping from a cold knife gradually falling to the tile floor beneath that is your gut as it closes in on itself. The characters are introduced through monologue to-camera auditions for the webcam broadcast, in which you learn their motivations for the experience and the cash. This will, however, not prepare you for second-guessing their motivations as the story goes on.

Not knowing too much about the characters is sometimes a downfall in horror you see – how to empathise with someone obnoxious when they end up saving people’s necks? In My Little Eye this actually works – these people are all in need of the cash, and so when desperation kicks in due to a worsening of the situation, they will do anything to try and keep the group together and win the cash. Not knowing which way they will turn due to the lack of real character information means the story teeters on that aforementioned knife’s edge. And in true great horror movie tradition, the actors are all unknowns, thus giving no clues away as to who will survive…or what will be left of them…

A nice parallel I spotted in film buff mode was the way the first 5+ months must have been dragging along with no real excitement for the inhabitants – which equals the pacing of the movie. You may well shift your feet impatiently if you’re not going along with the tale, but the payoff is more than rewarding, in fact in the words of many an irritating American chef, it “kicks up a notch” towards the end, smashing any preconceptions of a moribund survival story into a downright nasty and terrifying conclusion. The nature of the evil that is gripping the contestants is made all the more powerful by revelations linking back to a suspicion you may have held earlier in the movie…and it all ties up on a suitably dark note, which may well be the curse of this movie. It will never be a mainstream success, but should find a damn faithful crowd of followers on video. That’s the way it should be for horror movies! I loved the sadistic implications of the final scenes, they made any doubts that this was going to be good dissolve in my brain like urinal cakes under wee-water.

Lastly, the soundtrack is very well done – with only one typical rawk song coming from the controversial, sweary (and trendy) “Peaches” during a lurid sex scene (gratuitous boobs? Yup! It IS a real horror movie then!). The rest of the background noise looms in the distance, with modem noises blended in with the score to keep the internet theme in mind, whilst being unnerving as heck. The sound mix is also a good one, with wall-mounted cameras whirring round and zooming in on the terror-stricken 5 and very little else in the way of sound, making every creak of floorboards suspicious and each owl-hoot effective. Oh, and you WILL come to hate the klaxons signalling the housemate’s curfews and much as they would, no doubt.

***BAD BAD WEB***

To dislike, revile and disenchant come the typical genre elements of this movie. Whilst it’s far better that a lot of DTV efforts, it doesn’t break much new ground that fans of underground cinema won’t recognise from such favourites as Kolobos, Cube or any number of classic horror features. Genre fans will no doubt shelter this movie under an umbrella of understanding and delight, whilst those looking for a distraction from the tepid Hollywood comedies and lightweight action movies may well jump in a puddle next to it, splashing it with the waters of boredom and over-familiarity. And that’s about where I came in.

An original in places, solid addition to the smattering of decent horrors of the last 10 years, with nothing to discourage but the sense of déjà vu you may experience from some scenes and concepts.

Well worth a look.

© P$ 2002

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www.maxim-magazine.co.uk/mylittleeye

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Things I learned from watching this movie:

· Crows never appear when nice things are going to happen.
· Hammers are scary.
· Even grown-ups find the word “pussy” funny.
· It’s not always the quiet ones.
· The internet really is full of crap.
 

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