When I originally picked this film as a choice to review this was a pick for our sadly cancelled Pride episode, which sadly schedules haven't been able to put together, however I didn't want to miss the chance to give my thoughts on this gritty little film.

A Part of Shudders Queer horror season What Keeps You Alive is a dark tale of broken love and violence as married couple Jackie and Jules head out to Jackie's family cabin in the middle of nowhere to enjoy some time alone together. Now the fact we are being taken to the middle of nowhere is 100% a warning sign right? cabins in the wood are never a good thing but at first all seems perfect for the young couple.  When an old friend turns up at the cabin however Jackie's backstory is thrown into a bit of a panic. 

Jules tries to forget about it and enjoy the time they are spending together, the go shooting, the go for a walk by a cliff edge ANNNNND Jackie goes Janine Butcher on Jules (British soap refrence for the UK readers there). Confused Jules begins to learn the true evil nature of her wife as Jackie starts hunting her down to finish what she started.

The push I didn't see coming, I thought the childhood friend might be the problem here but even she thinks Jackie is a psychopath, this leads to a violent end to Sarah and her husband Daniel of course. You see the subtle breaking of Jackie even from the early goings. I adore the song Bloodlet which Jackie is singing acoustic to Jules. The song is a chilling folk song which definitely fits they overall feeling in the film. 

Hannah Emily Anderson is brilliant in this, her portrayal of Jackie and her different personality traits make your blood run cold, the way she switches between sweet caring wife and the woman who is going to end you is what keeps you going in a film which struggles a little with pacing at times. I wasn't expecting this plot, thinking more home invasion than kill your spouse by killing them but I liked it. I also am a huge fan of the soundtrack, I have been humming Bloodlet for bloody days.

It has a slow build, action, slow build then a brilliant final act which keeps you moving though this one even as I started the clock watch on occasion. 

The new work from Chris Silverston (All Cheerleaders Die, I Know Who Killed Me) opens with a boldness that immediately captures the audience's attention. A mother and her son arrive at a lakeside house in 50s America, fleeing past traumas that centre upon an absent patriarchal figure. This new abode seems to offer a respite and a new start, but instead comes with a monster that emerges from the aforementioned body of water, with designs on the younger member of our party. 
 
Monstrous comes with a raft of ideas, with much of the first half proving fascinating as we draw inspiration from previous horrors (the monster movies of the 50s, elevated horror that grapples with real world issues) that mixes with some admirable directing choices. Yet as the narrative weaves its way to its conclusion, the tension seems to dissipate as references get in the way of something more interesting to say. 
 
Having basically stolen the show in Yellowjacket, Christina Ricci once again shows her acting prowess, and much of what makes Monstrous so compelling comes from her turn. It makes the film a complicated piece and goes someway to paper over some of the narrative’s inconsistencies. You stick around to the conclusion mostly because Ricci is such a great watch, adding emotional weight and heft to proceedings. You only wish that what surrounds her came close to matching her talents. 
 
Silverston’s latest feels like it squanders an intriguing set-up and great lead turn with too many tropes and themes that lack a path to fulfill their potential. Monstrous finds itself stuck between the more enjoyable aspects of a monster movie and the thematic weight of more modern works. Some great design work can’t hide a horror that leaves the viewer eager for something a bit more satisfying in its conclusion. ​

It’s one week to the Thibodaux Alligator Festival and this stretch of Louisiana backwater is about to come face to face with a menace which will put their fiftieth annual celebrations under threat. Or maybe it’s not exactly face to face, as the generally soused townsfolk are under threat from something that has a specific M.O. of “eatin’ people - by the ass”! 

Executive producer, writer and director Paul Dale’s DIY creature feature opens with a promotion for the forthcoming Alligator Festival which captures the ramshackle nature of both local advertising and the movie itself. Sewer Gators is an ultra-low budget enterprise which spends a substantial proportion of its time swerving flashy visuals and special effects, relying on its sense of cheesy humour and the overriding sense that this is a bad film that knows it’s bad. 

As welcome an idea as this could be, there isn’t an endless supply of goodwill that can be generated from pointing at your own work and inviting you to chuckle along at how terrible the on-screen action is. Eventually, the viewer is likely to cross that line into the territory of “Hold on, this really is terrible, why am I watching this?”. For connoisseurs of this kind of thing, Sewer Gators staves off a trip there – just about – by virtue of its short running time, its cast of eternally bewildered, backwoods monster fodder and its penchant for Jaws references. Everyone else? All bets are off. 

Even at just over an hour, the plot still manages to tread water more than its occasional shots of real alligators, throwing in skits featuring intrepid local Live Action News reporter - not to mention generally awful human being - Brock Peterson (Dale again) and a weird subplot involving a wandering Mormon who gets fairly short shrift from the locals as he attempts to spread the good word. This particular strand of the story is resolved in a bizarre way which you will not see coming. That’s not to say it’s logical, or even good, but you will not see it coming. 

The opening spools out to a fun song but even at that early point in the proceedings there’s an ominous taste of the leisurely approach this will take when it comes to the alligator action. The titles flash up messages such as “DON’T WORRY” followed by “THE FILM WILL START SOON” and although there’s something audacious, perhaps oddly amusing, about such blatant time filling even before the bloody thing’s even reached the ten-minute mark, it’s also annoying. 

The first victim of the titular beast is the unfortunate Pete, who lives in a house with little furniture and he buys the farm before he can fulfil his partner’s request that they should “go to the IKEAs”. From then on, the story alternates between the day to day activities of Sheriff Mitch (Kenny Bellau) and various gator versus citizen vignettes, the kills delivered via bloodless POV. The fleeting glimpses of ketchup look as if it’s just that being deployed – ketchup. I was left feeling hungry for chips rather than having my bloodlust satisfied. 

A good while after the point at which the story looks like it’s going nowhere at all, alligator expert Laura Andrews (Manon Pages) shows up and the scene is set for the forces of law order, the forces of science and the forces of seasoned prepper/gator hunter Shane (Austin Naulty) to team up and definitely not mirror anything that happens in a very famous shark movie I may have mentioned earlier. 

To be fair, some of those homages are responsible for raising the few smiles on offer here. There’s a familiar face off between Mayor and Sheriff about the prospect of the Festival being cancelled, the rip-off of the “nails down the chalkboard” sequence is nicely done and Shane’s dialogue can best be described as Quint-essential, let’s put it that way.  

I’m willing to bet that this was a whole lot of fun to make but I spent the bulk of Sewer Gators willing for that joy to translate into the film I was watching. The scattershot approach to the material isn’t necessarily a bad thing but the gator menace often takes a back seat to odd characters doing weird things for comedic effect. It’s pleasing there are running gags throughout but the quality of them is often ropey and there’s a tendency to hammer the more inspired ideas into the floor. 

When Thibodaux’s finest are under attack in the final act, the focus moves from unseen terror to inanimate, rubber facsimiles being thrown at the actors who are required to wrestle with them as best they can. I’ll admit, I cracked up laughing the first time it happened but the law of diminishing returns sets in extremely quickly and by the time Sheriff’s Office employee Gladyis (Sophia Brazda) was flailing around her kitchen with tiny plastic critters stuck on her face, I had to check that someone hadn’t spiked my cup of tea. 

It has to be said that Sewer Gators does pull out all the CGI stops for its climax. Well, some of the CGI stops anyway. Well, maybe a couple of CGI stops. There is a payoff but it’s brief, unspectacular and doesn’t match the ridiculousness of what’s gone before. Fade to black. At just over fifty-two minutes. Huh? Let’s just go back and check the timer there. Yes. Just over fifty-two minutes. I mean, I don’t think it could be justifiably called a short, but… 

Let’s also give a shout out to those end credits which are the slowest moving I’ve ever seen, taking the best part of NINE minutes to finally shift themselves from the screen. I’ve seen Marvel movies get their cast and crew info out of the way more quickly and they employ a small country’s worth of talent. Still, this gives plenty of time for those actors to enjoy their name in lights and the means to get the movie over an hour in length using a method so barefaced in its cheek that one of the credits actually tells you it’s doing so. If you’re a fan of procrastination, this could be the film for you. 

The result of this literal crawl is that you can hear a conspiracy-laden local radio broadcast called Swamp Talk as you wonder whether those names are actually scrolling at all, then there are a few out-takes, an infomercial of sorts for a Freedom Toilet (I’m not making this up) and a closing song which, as self-referential tunes go, falls some way short of the gold standard for this type of ditty set by the peerless, Sinatra-style crooning from Zombeavers. 

Even with a runtime that’s one helping of episodic television once you chop off the front and back acknowledgments, casual viewers are going to be checking their watches after the first couple of characters have died from having a camera zoom in on their face and bad movie buffs might well be annoyed at how much they’re being purposely, consistently nudged about the lack of quality on display here.
 
Performance-wise, Pages and Bellau aren’t exactly Streep and De Niro – and you shouldn’t expect them to be - but they’re not terrible and, to be fair, the material doesn’t allow them to do much other than goof around and pause for the audience to laugh. And I really did want to laugh. As someone who makes a point of trying to steer folks towards underseen, micro budgeted efforts, titles such as Sewer Gators, for all the enthusiasm on display, don’t provide the greatest evidence to challenge those raised on multiplex-friendly flicks.
 
If you’ve partaken of more alcohol than even the most sozzled of Thibodaux’s perma-refreshed population, Sewer Gators may be for you. If you’re a bad movie completist, this review will probably have you downloading it right now. For the rest of the planet, this will feel like a series of loosely-related sketches stretched to breaking point. Gorehounds, genre buffs, gator fans and giggle aficionados alike will all feel short changed by this one. ​

Anti-vaxxer, anti-masker, MAGA fan and social media star Annie Hardy (Annie Hardy) takes a flight to the pandemic-blighted UK to call in on her old bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). When Annie’s abrasive nature and penchant for live streaming absolutely everything immediately creates tension in the household and causes significant issues in Stretch’s work life as a food delivery guy, there’s no particular prospect of conciliatory behaviour being shown the guest from across the pond.

In fact, Annie decides to take off with Stretch’s car and finds herself with a stack of money to drive a mask-wearing woman called Angela (Angela Enohoro) to a specific address. No sooner has she agreed to the job that matters take a turn for the strange and the evening only gets crazier and more terrifying from there…

Considering the sheer amount of discourse surrounding this film, from its festival showings last year to the most recent stories in the UK surrounding its supposed ban from the Vue cinema chain, it would seem too easy to simply love this merely for being a beacon of free speech and “the movie they tried to ban!” or to loathe it for the engineered controversy and that Dashcam’s central character is one of the most offensive and unlikeable in the horror genre.

Either way, objectivity appears to have been instructed to take a back seat while folks on both sides froth at the mouth and tell you exactly why you should think as they do. With all of that as a backdrop, reviewing Dashcam seems like a fool’s errand but I am that fool and let’s go run that errand.

As with Rob Savage’s previous found footage film Host, this one doesn’t hang about either, avoiding the fake scares and long sequences of naff all going on which the opening half of so many films in the subgenre use to pad the running time. Here, there’s sufficient character intro detail to get you started but it’s not long before the main plot kicks in and the shit hits the fans literal seconds after Annie has chosen to accept her mission for the night.

From then on, most of the story beats are generally of the “what the hell is going on?” variety and exposition is scant but Dashcam’s focus is more about the journey than the destination, careening from one gory set piece to the next as our protagonist is confronted with ever more bizarre situations and a primary pursuer that just won’t stay dead (or is it undead?).

The plentiful, escalating chaos also resolves a number of the issues around Annie being somewhat difficult to take a ride with. I’m sure there’s more than a little glee to be felt when someone on screen who doesn’t share your world view is plunged into a situation that starts badly and only gets worse and her random, sweary outbursts every time she was under attack did raise a chuckle or two, I’ll admit.

That’s not to say that Dashcam either condones or condemns its streaming star. Annie is merely presented as a person with a very specific viewpoint who doesn’t care who she offends as she crashes through life. Her opinions may be difficult to listen to but that’s part of the point and it’s up to the individual viewer as to whether or not her comments are genuinely offensive. As someone who knew people who did not survive Covid, the anti-vax dialogue did raise my hackles but does that mean it shouldn’t be voiced, even in a fictional context such as this? We’re on a slippery slope if our initial reaction is just to silence anyone with a conflicting viewpoint without entering into any sort of discussion.

Yes, using all of this as a platform to step into a found footage nightmare may be questionable from a moral and ethical standpoint but the framework of Annie’s “Band Car” show, plus her drive to broadcast her polarising view of the world, is exactly what lands her in an increasingly large amount of trouble, the anger from Stretch turning out to be the very least of her worries.
Anyone expecting the structured approach of Host is going to be thrown for a loop by this sophomore effort, which throws both its characters and cameras around the landscape, tumbling down hills, falling into water and turning more than one situation into a literal, absolute car crash. There are the usual periods of unfocused, motion sickness-inducing camera work but there are also sequences which take the opportunity to show off surprisingly gory effects, rather than fall back on the fleeting, budget-friendly glimpses of bloodshed so beloved of this type of movie.

As found footage films go, Dashcam doesn’t fall into the trap of being short on incident, in fact the ongoing ordeal stops to draw breath so infrequently that I felt battered into submission by it all as the credits rolled. Subtlety isn’t on the menu and the combination of that and the unrelentingly abrasive nature of its leading lady may prove an endurance test but for those who can push past that there’s a breezy, nasty little trip waiting for them.
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It may not be the game changer it’s been touted as in some quarters but it also shows enough glimpses of savage inventiveness to breathe at least a little life into a corner of horror which often necessitates wading through an hour of nothing to get to the good stuff. For all of the discussion swirling around Dashcam, one thing it definitely isn’t is dull. It’s just a shame that the hype and the ongoing furore will probably override what is a perfectly serviceable frightener with particularly dark humour and splattery moments. And if you’re getting tired of the main on-screen action you can always read the scrolling comments from Annie’s viewers.