Screened Out – As Above/So Below

[one-star-rating]Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman[/one-star-rating]

The shaky horror flick depicts a trip to Hell via the Paris catacombs. For the audience, Hell is dumb characters, cheap sets, outdated film gimmicks, and an overall lack of creativity.

Notice how the actors don’t sound familiar? That’s on purpose. Director John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine) is stealing from The Blair Witch Project 15 years ago, filming a documentary of unknown performers portraying stupid people. These boneheads want to traverse the old Paris stone mines, which are now filled with over 6 million human remains. They all have digital cameras strapped on – making for vomit-inducing cinematography – as they act like morons.

The stupidity is the worst, because we’re supposed to believe that Weeks is a genius student of archeology and ancient cultures. She’s the most destructive, least respectful of this group. She chips away at antiquities and throws bones left and right in her quest to find The Philosopher’s Stone, made by Nicholas Flamel.

Right now, Harry Potter fans should be perking up. Yes, it’s the same stone Rowling wrote about, the one that could assure eternal life. As Above/So Below also robs National Treasure, utilizing some shoddy, sloppy clue hunting. It’s the sort of sleuthing that fills me with rage – when the script introduces a fact only at the very moment it’s important to move the plot (what little there is) along.

Don’t forget that Weeks is looking for this stone, because the film does by the end. It also introduces characters who then disappear. We expect them to reappear later, but that would be like expecting this script to have consistency.

At least As Above/So Below is actually filmed in the Paris catacombs. However, because these pillagers destroy part of it, half of the set pieces are noticeably fake. It’s almost comical how obvious this is.

What’s worse is that this “found footage” gimmick is stale and overdone. It robs the film of any fright, because we now know how cheaply and easily it’s all made. It feels the producers seriously skimped on actor’s salaries, sets, costumes, and even special effects. They started their penny pinching with the bare-bones, illogical script.

Besides borrowing from Harry Potter, Blair Witch, and National Treasure, this flick throws in some medieval, Catholic views of a dullish, physical Hell, hoping audience claustrophobia will supply fear where there is none.

Also, stealing from Solaris, this movie has their idiots’ worst nightmares become corporeal in the bowels under Paris. Not expensively real – no, just a random piano or bone or piece of rope.

[rating-key]

A little creativity and cash could’ve made this so much better. The characters’ demons are introduced one by one; it would have been delightful to have these terrors elaborately play against each other for a more intricate plot. Dowdle never addresses plot holes that gape like open graves. Eternal damnation itself should look different from the catacombs; Hell could be more terrible, more innovative. First things first, quit pretending this is found footage; in 2014, that filming technique is DOA.

The whole movie should have been more groundbreaking, in every sense of the word. Hell, it seems, is ho-hum.