Disc Reviews

Black Water Vampire Review

• 27th Mar 2014

Black Water Vampire is the latest in a new sub-genre of the horror film – the ‘found footage’ horror. The first of these was The Blair Witch Project (1999), one of the most successful profit : budget ratio films ever made. It cost $22,000 to make and made $240.5 million, a ratio of $1 spent for every $10,931 made. Little surprise that for low budget horror film makers (which they never cease to tire of) the low budget found footage horror is still an attractive proposition. There have been many films of the ilk made to varying degrees of success; as well as a few sequels there has been The Last Horror Movie (2005), Zombie Diaries (2006), [• Rec], Diary of the Dead (both 2007), Contagion (2008), the Paranormal Activity films and others that have used clever special-effects with hand held cameras such as Cloverfield (2007), Monsters (2010) and the witty Troll Hunter (2010) amongst many others. Hardly surprising and hardly original then that Black Water Vampire should be the latest. What this films is that it is the first vampire found footage horror.

The look of the film and its narrative is very similar to The Blair Witch Project. The story begins in 2002 with the legend surrounding an alleged serial killer who has abducted several teenage and young girls with their bodies found in the woods completely drained of blood. A local, Raymond Banks is accused of the killings and is imprisoned for being criminally insane. The locals call him a monster. However, 10 years later a young film crew believe that the man might not be guilty after all and go to the wintry Wisconsin in Black Water and search for clues themselves and to make a documentary recording the events and their finds. They interview the locals where they are met with hostility before going camping in the snowbound woods. Needless to say there are plenty of “what’s that over there” as the DV night vision camera pans the wooded night time landscape. The crew, led by Andrea Adams go-a camping and after they find the location where one of the murders has happened. They consequently become lost and have no clue where they are. One day they wake up to find a bloody symbol on the their tent (another Blair Witch Project trope) and the cocky youngsters start to feel really concerned; they also begin to see some of the locals in the wood when one night they witness a bat-like human form that begins to attack them…

The Blair Witch Project has been superseded by films that DO show the monster making this film effective (and naturally adding to the budget) but never the less other films have done this a lot better and at least made a pretence to have moved on from Blair Witch. The skinny Nosferat type of creature truly is monstrous though and livens up the plot just as it is about to sag but the viewer is left wondering how many more of these found. The terror and action goes wild in the last 10 minutes but this doesn’t make up for the quite dull start in a vague attempt to flesh out some characters (if you excuse the pun). Black Water Vampire receives its UK debut on DVD on the 24^th March but doesn’t offer anything really new unless the viewer wants more regurgitation of Blair Witch.

Chris Hick