Dashcam

Review

I went into this movie knowing absolutely nothing about it, other than the fact that it was found-footage based on the title and Hulu description. A lot of times I feel very fortunate to go into movies with a blank slate for my opinions, this was not one of those times. I wish I had stumbled across a review or at least some information about this movie before deciding to watch it because I think I would have skipped this one.

This movie is set during quarantine where our protagonist is an anti-masker and goes to the UK to meet up with a friend and get away from American liberals. When she gets in an argument with her friend and his girlfriend she steals their car and ends up being paid to take an old lady, Angela, to a specific address. She soon realizes that there is another lady chasing after her to get Angela back and that Angela might not be all that she seems. Angela ends up being a psychic, demon(?) who eats people and she begins hunting down the protagonist and Stretch who has found her. The movie ends with the protagonist getting to the location she was supposed to take Angela to, killing Angela, encountering more demons, and eventually getting away in Stretch’s car which has been brought to this location.

First off, the main character is as infuriating as the anti-masker fact would lead you to believe and it gets even worse when you realize that apparently this was a little less than acting and the real-life Annie Hardy thinks and acts this way. I couldn’t stand her, there’s no moment where she ever truly realizes the situation she’s in and stops being a dick, she just doubles down over and over. I don’t really know if I have anything positive to say about her but I’m going to hazard that it’s a no.

Stretch didn’t really bother me that much. he’s mostly just annoyed with Annie for most of the movie and I honestly really wonder why he still keeps in contact with her and lets her know where he lives if he is so far removed from their touring days 10 years ago.

This movie doesn’t give you much by way of information. What is Angela? Why were all those people in the basement of the house? How did Angela turn old? Why is that dinner part of this human-trafficking? These are all questions that I could not answer leaving this film and I don’t think that the film-makers really thought about it that far. At first it just seems like Angela is psychic, sure okay I’m on board, but then she is like a feral demon that eats people? Like before she gets her mouth open she’s very docile and calm so why does she become so agitated the second her mouth is open. We hear her screaming before her mouth is opened but why does she become actually aggressive?

With that said, Angela is very scary. This movie basically earned all of it’s 4 points off of how scary it was. They did a really good job of making her very freaky and ever time you see her move in the background or rise into the air or whatever, I was sufficiently freaked out. However, I didn’t like the fact that she would go from very loud to deathly quiet. Throughout the movie it really doesn’t seem like Angela has much cognition, especially after getting her mouth open, so how she was able to figure out when silent stalking was a better hunting method was pretty confusing to me.

However another issue I had with this movie was how unnecessarily gross this movie was. There was no reason why Angela had to piss and shit herself and even further, no reason why they should have shown the audience that if they were so desperate to have it in the film. It just comes across as shocking for the sake of shock factor especially since it was largely unnecessary.

Finally, the end of this movie took literally forever. The amusement park felt like a final boss battle area but the movie kept going. Annie back in the woods felt like the end, but the movie kept going. Annie getting to the original address felt like a lead-up to her finding out the true story and the end, but that didn’t happen and the movie kept going. Then finally we get to the other demons and the car area and that’s finally the boss battle area. This was about 30 minutes of what I though was going to be the last 10 minutes and so by the end I was certifiably ready to be done so I could stop watching this stupid movie.

In conclusion, I won’t watch this again. I won’t recommend this to anyone, actually, I will probably recommend people against watching this movie for what it’s worth. Anyways, time to watch a better movie.