The Bay - a shit student film

Every time I watch a slightly rubbish horror film I wonder how I found out about it in the first place.  I know I get a lot of my film recommendations from renowned trash-horror fan Mark Kermode, but when I watch a horror film they normally have trailers for other horror films and so I think I get drawn in by them too.  I can't remember which of these methods caused me to put The Bay on to my DVD rental list, but I need to find out so I can exact vengeance upon it.  The Bay is one of the least scary, least gripping and least interesting 'horror' films I have seen for a very long time.  And I watched Don't be Afraid of the Dark just last month!

I'm getting bored just thinking about the premise of The Bay.  There's a small town on the US eastern seaboard where a reporter is telling us via Skype call that something bad happened.  It is now 3 years after the event, the government hushed it up and she's trying to get the message out.  Over the next 80 minutes we are going to listen to her narrate a bunch of 'found footage' from the day of the crisis.  All implausibly filmed, all implausibly available to this one reporter, all drained of any drama because we know she's going to survive.  Imagine one of those filler episodes of the X-Files from the later series - it's like that but without any proper actors or wit.

The town has a chicken factory that is probably breaking rules on GM food and waste disposal, and the mayor of the town is probably involved in some kind of backroom handshake deals with the factory owners, and this deal probably means that something bad will happen.  The end.  There's footage from some marine biologists who died some weeks before.  There's footage from various police cameras of weird goings on.  There's footage from a couple who are out on the bay while everything kicks off.  There's footage from skype calls between the local hospital and the federal disease control centre.  All of it is mashed together and voiced over to tell a very predictable story about corporate wrong-doing that results in environmental disaster.  The acting is occasionally terrible, effects cheesy (one character even points out that a picture looks like it has been photoshopped) and the ending just sort of happens leaving no suspense, no mystery, no whodunnit, no nothing.

It's like a student production in which they had a half-way interesting idea but didn't really do any script editing and then ran out of motivation to finish it half way through.  The film is littered with flashbacks to stuff it already showed us, with slightly different voice-overs that try to put a new slant on what we already saw, but it just left me thinking about how uninteresting it is to watch this found footage the first time - let alone multiple times.  Seriously - don't bother.