Borderlands - 90 minutes of popcorn horror

Friday night a week ago I was home alone and so I did what any normal horror film fan does; I watched a horror film with the lights off.  The Borderlands is a small budget British 'found footage' film that follows a team of paranormal investigators for the Catholic church who investigate something that has happened in a rural part of Devon.  The team consists of Deacon - a paranormal expert who flies around the world investigating events that people claim are miracles - and Gray - his tech guy who insists on installing cameras everywhere they go to record everything.  Which of course provides plenty of footage ready to be found by us the viewer.

The idea is that the vicar of the local church has submitted a video to the Vatican showing a supposed miracle during a child's baptism.  There appears to be some sort of earthquake during which the camera feed cuts in and out.  Deacon's job is ostensibly to investigate, but there is a strong suggestion that he's actually there to debunk the idea of the miracle ever happening.  Their presence in the local village is not appreciated, especially after the vicar suspects that people aren't taking him seriously and adopts extreme measures to try to prove his point.  The plot proceeds in the way you might expect from this sort of horror film.  Weird things happen, the locals set fire to some things, there are some strange noises, the cameras sometimes don't work the suggestion of something paranormal going on gets bigger and bigger.  It is a horror film after all.

There is definitely one moment of cleverness involving a headstone that pleased me greatly when I spotted it.  And aside from that the film does a nice job of setting up tensions and making you jump.  Ultimately the final scenes are spooky and then properly grim; and though I guess that's all you can really ask for in a film like this the ending doesn't seem consistent with much of what builds up to it.  It's very derivative though, and not really that different to a lot of the other films out there, so I'm not going to recommend anyone goes out of their way to watch it.  Overall, I'm fairly luke warm to Borderlands, but it certainly has it's place on a lonely night home alone in the dark.