Rating: C
Dir: Osei Kofi
Star: Caroline Ampong Alpha, Cobby Emmanuel Yeboah, Josephine Musah, Kelvin Yeboah
To be completely honest, my knowledge of African cinema in general is woefully lacking: it largely begins and ends with the Wakaliwood productions out of Uganda, such as Who Killed Captain Alex?. While glorious in their own terms, and a masterpiece of low-budget inventiveness, it feels like it can hardly be representative of the continent as a whole. On the other hand, the few I have seen, such as the Nigerian entry from 31 Countries of Horror, Ajuwaya – The Haunted Village, do suggest films which are entirely targeted at a local audience. These consumers appear on the evidence to be tolerant of limited resources and stories which lean towards the basic.
Given my ignorance, I turned towards Wikipedia for information, though their Cinema of Ghana article raised almost as many questions as it answered. Some elements were helpful, such as discovering the local film industry is nick-named Ghallywood. Then there are sentences like,”After the overthrow of Nkrumah [Ghana’s first president] in 1966, the film industry in Ghana had a nose down.” Or the surprising claim, “Ghana was the first country in the world to use VHS cameras to shoot feature-length films.” I would have liked to know more about that, but the absence of any citation makes it impossible. However, it was interesting to read that the Ghana Film Industry Corporation initially rejected these, despite their commercial success, and banned its directors from working on video features.
Eventually, the GFIC got sold off to a Malaysian TV company, leaving the independent film-makers as the Ghanaian film industry “Films depicting African witchcraft are popular”, according to Wikipedia, though one of the few to have achieved any recognition is SF alien invasion epic 2016, whose trailer looks like a bizarre mash-up of Predator and The Terminator. If the Predator went around punting babies. Sadly, no subtitled version of this exists, because it would appear to be deep into Captain Alex territory for demented, full-throttle over-ambition. If you are interested in learning more, I recommend watching the documentary Ghanaian Video Tales. Though made in 2005, so pre-dating Captured by more than a decade, I suspect little has changed. It’s a good look at the low-budget film industry there, with a special emphasis on horror movies.
If Ghana has made any impact on world genre cinema, it’s probably not as a result of its own cinema so much as the glorious, hand-painted advertising posters made for Western movies. These originally were done on flour sacks, and were rightly infamous for playing fast and loose with the subject matter in the name of advertising. Witness, for example, the wonders of Jaws, which is made to look more like an idea rejected by Mark Polonia. These are, justifiably, seen as art in their own right, and if you’ve enough cash, the Deadly Prey gallery in Chicago can hook you up with artists there who will paint to order. These may be more interesting than Captured, which is a kinda basic slasher, to be honest.
One thing’s for sure, this is almost complete in its obscurity. There’s no IMDb entry for it, or its director. While Googling gets me an Osei Kofi from Ghana. it’s the man revered as among their greatest football players, who almost signed for Stoke City in 1969, on the recommendation of Gordon Banks, and is now a pastor. So I suspect he’s not the same one directing low-budget video horror. Otherwise, nothing. This appears to be the first review on the Internet of the film, in the eight years since it was released. And that year is entirely reliant on the source from which I got the film, with nothing to back it up or prove otherwise. At least it is in English. Considering Ghana has nine government-sponsored languages, I’ll take it.
We begin by seeing the predations of Eric (C.E. Yeboah) who is abducting women, torturing and killing them. Initially, he seems to be videotaping the process (top); this angle plays no further part and may happily be ignored. One of the victims is Hannah (Alpha), who is dragged out of her house in the middle of the night, much to the concern of her housemate, Careen (Musah). The authorities – consisting almost entirely of Officer John (K. Yeboah, who walks like Idris Elba in Luther) – are distinctly unhelpful, though after Hannah is able to place a brief call to her friend, they have to take action. John takes Careen with him to the home of the phone’s owner, for a confrontation with Eric.
There’s little new here, and while the source from which I got this said it was inspired by Saw, you’d be hard-pushed to tell. The only point it goes beyond simple torture porn, is when Eric makes two of his captives fight each other to the death (above). There is a twist in the final act, which I only somewhat expected, and I was amused by Eric’s sporting a T-shirt which says, “I am not a role model” on it. The main problem technically is terrible audio, which frequently renders the dialogue so low in the mix as to be almost inaudible. Fortunately, you could turn the sound off and still understand 99% of what’s going on, and I did find Kofi has a decent eye for camera placement.
While I am generally a proponent of the “less is more” approach to cinema, this is just too simplistic to be effective. We never get any insight into Eric’s motives, and the pacing in the early going is a bit sluggish. I will say it’s at least somewhat gorier than I expected, with a stabbing to the eye that provoked a genuine, audible reaction out of me. On the other hand, there’s little to separate it from any other low-budget slasher, regardless of location. I suspect even the Ghanaian poster artists might have a hard time pumping up this one’s level of audience interest to significant levels.
This review is part of our October 2024 feature, 31 More Countries of Horror.