Much is made about the fact that the movie "Observance" was made on a budget of about $11,000. Frankly, in my opinion, the budget shows. The production values actually look surprisingly good for such a low- budget entry, and that explains a lot. All the money and effort was expended to produce a film that LOOKED reasonably good in spite of a shoestring budget, and so no money was spent elsewhere, like, say, writing a story that was interesting enough to make into a film.
From what I understand, "Observance" has done fairly well on the film festival circuit, so maybe I'm a Philistine. But I don't think so.
I've lived long enough to see more than a few horror movies where I can recognize cheap and cheesy results because there simply wasn't enough money left in the budget to spend on the story.
Remember when you were a kid and had something like mumps or chickenpox, something that gave you a very high fever sufficient to distort your perception? Your small-child experiences during the course of the fever were INNATELY horrifying because everything was nightmarishly distorted. As a kid, you had no understanding of what a fever was and what it could do to your perceptions. You didn't understand whether what you were seeing was real, a hallucination, basic reality distorted through a fever lens, and so on. You might not even have understood that there were even such things as hallucinations. As far as you could tell your whole world had gone crazy and terrifying, especially in the dark. I can remember some of the things I saw to this day and they still have the power to scare the snot out of me as an adult.
Well, that's what the viewer gets with this movie. You can't tell if what you're seeing is real, hallucination, something supernatural, symptomology of a disease or some kind of poisoning, and so on. So, intrinsically, whatever you experience as a result of this devil's brew of cognitive pollutants being flung at you from the screen leads to a sense of queasy confusion. It is anything BUT good, scary storytelling.
I also get the sense that there's an element of The Emperor's New Clothes going on here. What you experience with this (and similarly structured movies) is such a mishmash of incomprehensible goulash that you're worried that some sort of sophisticated symbolism or metaphorical abstraction is going on and that you, personally, just don't get it. So you pretend that you DO get it so you don't look stupid, cooing at its insight and sophistication, all the while having absolutely no idea what "it" is.
You can achieve essentially the same effect much easier by just tying a victim to an office chair, covering their head with a bag, and then twirling them around until they get sick and throw up.
I give the movie maker props for making a professional LOOKING movie so cheaply, but that's it. He's not a filmmaking impresario. He's more of a sneaky hack.
From what I understand, "Observance" has done fairly well on the film festival circuit, so maybe I'm a Philistine. But I don't think so.
I've lived long enough to see more than a few horror movies where I can recognize cheap and cheesy results because there simply wasn't enough money left in the budget to spend on the story.
Remember when you were a kid and had something like mumps or chickenpox, something that gave you a very high fever sufficient to distort your perception? Your small-child experiences during the course of the fever were INNATELY horrifying because everything was nightmarishly distorted. As a kid, you had no understanding of what a fever was and what it could do to your perceptions. You didn't understand whether what you were seeing was real, a hallucination, basic reality distorted through a fever lens, and so on. You might not even have understood that there were even such things as hallucinations. As far as you could tell your whole world had gone crazy and terrifying, especially in the dark. I can remember some of the things I saw to this day and they still have the power to scare the snot out of me as an adult.
Well, that's what the viewer gets with this movie. You can't tell if what you're seeing is real, hallucination, something supernatural, symptomology of a disease or some kind of poisoning, and so on. So, intrinsically, whatever you experience as a result of this devil's brew of cognitive pollutants being flung at you from the screen leads to a sense of queasy confusion. It is anything BUT good, scary storytelling.
I also get the sense that there's an element of The Emperor's New Clothes going on here. What you experience with this (and similarly structured movies) is such a mishmash of incomprehensible goulash that you're worried that some sort of sophisticated symbolism or metaphorical abstraction is going on and that you, personally, just don't get it. So you pretend that you DO get it so you don't look stupid, cooing at its insight and sophistication, all the while having absolutely no idea what "it" is.
You can achieve essentially the same effect much easier by just tying a victim to an office chair, covering their head with a bag, and then twirling them around until they get sick and throw up.
I give the movie maker props for making a professional LOOKING movie so cheaply, but that's it. He's not a filmmaking impresario. He's more of a sneaky hack.