DVD Review: Followers (2017)

April 19, 2018

Written by DanXIII

Daniel XIII; the result of an arcane ritual involving a King Diamond album, a box of Count Chocula, and a copy of Swank magazine, is a screenwriter, director, producer, actor, artist, and reviewer of fright flicks…Who hates ya baby?

Two amazingly perfect social media fitness-centric “celebrities” head out into the deep woods for a lil’ R&R (which they plan to record every minute of…which is a needed conceit seeing as how this is a found footage fright flick and all). But there is more to this yarn, as two online documentary film makers who want to prove how easy it is to track someone on social media and find them no matter where they are, follow our couple into those aforementioned woods…but just what do they plan on doing to them once they are found?
While on the surface Followers may not appear to be the most original horror picture you could ever see (especially blending found footage and stalk n’ slay elements), but it has some clever use of social media elements (including a Facetime cold open murder to start things off), and Actors Amanda Delaney and Justin Maina as our comely protagonists do a really solid job portraying their narcissistic characters, and the parallel story featuring Sean Michael Gloria and Nishant Gogna as the passionate film makers is equally well done (and seeing how the two stories dovetail was especially intriguing). Speaking of characters, many of them have more going on than what is at first believed which adds to maintaining audience interest…and speaking of interest, there’s an out-of-left field, eleventh hour twist that changes the paradigm of the goings-on that I really enjoyed…but of course I can’t spill the beastly beans on what that is here…
On the negative side; this film suffers from the bane that curses one too many found footage films; namely that it’s padded like a mother fucker…the characters ramble on and on and waste time for over twenty five minutes before anything of note happens (minus a brief encounter with some pick-up truck driving local yokels. and a “false” scare sequence). Set up and character building are fine (and obviously necessary) in any film, but in these affairs the whole thing always seems like a ploy to artificially stretch the run time as any info gleaned is dropped in randomly among a whole lotta nothin’, and Followers is no exception, though things pick up much, much better once the documentary angle is introduced in the second act (but it has a touch of padding as well, especially once the woods are entered).
As for extras included on this DVD release we get…two trailers for some other films…totally awesome.
Due to an interesting parallel story line dynamic, strong acting, well done character arcs, and an unforeseen narrative element, I’m going to recommend Followers; it’s a fun lil’ found footage fright flick fracas that proves there’s still originality to be had in the double “F” sub-genre for horror hounds!
 

 


 

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