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MY LITTLE EYE (2002)
Alas, nobody gets stabbed in the eye Of all the "reality horror" movies to come forth in the wake of The Blair Witch Project, My Little Eye is probably the most successful I've seen...which, if you've seen The St. Francisville Experiment or Halloween: Resurrection, you should know is damn faint praise. Five young adults agree to spend six months in a remote house which is wired all over with cameras, to be the subject of a lengthy 24/7 webcast which will reward them with a million dollars should they all last the entire time. So for almost six months, things appear to be uneventful; with just the five of them in the house and no communication other than occasional food deliveries left out in the woods, it's not like they have challenges to do or contests with each other. As we see in a quick split-split-screen montage, all they do for this time is bicker, shower, eat, play video games, read...who would want to watch any of this, let alone for six months? We see early on that the subjects of the webcast are not being dealt with entirely honestly; while there are many cameras visibly mounted all over the house (almost every camera angle in the movie appears meant to suggest a shot from one of these cameras), some of them are hidden. There are cameras in flashlights, shower heads, video game controllers, even one in a fountain pen. With days left in the webcast, things start getting creepy in the house. Ugly, personal messages get scrawled in frosted windows, bloody hammers get left in beds (we never find out how that got there), and they get weapons instead of food. Some of the tenants are freaked out; one in particular repeatedly insists that the company who is hosting them is simply trying to encourage them to call it quits so they don't have to part with the million bucks. Sounds reasonable, until some things happen which can't be so dismissed. My Little Eye cooks at a really slow burn for most of its length, but it does cook. But it does, sadly, ultimately fall apart, because of two things that fail at about the same time: logic and pacing. The more the story explains itself, the more unlikely it gets and sooner or later most viewers are going to have a tough time taking it seriously. Meanwhile, that slow burn turns into a sputtering series of almost-flames. The imdb makes mention of "a disastrous test screening of a four-hour version of the film", which is kind of hard to believe because who would bother test screening a four-hour movie? I don't buy it. The notion of there being more than twice as much of this movie in some other form only takes away from its charm of being a little movie that was almost pretty good. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |