Rating: E
Dir: Michael Rock
Star: Natalie Hurt, Amanda Morgan, Michael Rock, Blake Hyer
At the risk of giving the makers an unwarranted pull-quote, this is a highly effective movie… Albeit only at reminding me of precisely why I generally hate the found footage genre. There are times when it’s clearly an artistic choice, made to convey the immediacy and realism of a specific situation. And there are times when it’s because the director has no money, and either hasn’t the talent or the inclination to write a proper script. Guess which category this falls into? It takes part in the Nevada desert where Bray (Rock) and Mac (Hyer) run the titular event, an overnight hike into the Nevada desert intended to push the participants to their physical and mental limits.
Except – and stop me if this is, in any way, unexpected – things do not go as planned for Alannah (Hurt), her best gal pal Emily (Morgan) and the other marchers. Ruckers? Whatever. Oh, they are pushed to their limits, certainly. And I could relate, my patience being pushed to its limits too, as well as my general tolerance toward low-budget cinema. Even though it runs a mere fifty-three minutes, it feels like you are reliving the entire 16-hour ruck in real time. For up until the last ten, you are watching people wandering about the desert and exchanging banal chit-chat, their numbers being reduced solely by mentions of some members of the group having dropped out. Ooh, scary.
The dramatic highlight is, I kid you not, people eating worms. Or possibly pretending to eat worms, because I would not trust this film as far as I could throw it. I hope it wasn’t real, because if you’re going to do gross stuff on camera, applying to Fear Factor would be a better use of your time than this. And that show has been off the air for seven years. [Being revived for next spring though, but let’s not allow that to get in the way of some well-merited snark] Then, at the end, we get the “surprise”, a lot of shaky-cam and – I trust I’m not spoiling it – characters die. Had this been happening from the get-go, we might, and key word: might, be have been onto something.
That, however, would have required Rock to demonstrate some degree of rigour to his cinematic craft, instead of making it all up as he went along. Or giving a convincing impression thereof, at least. How can a film which lasts well short of an hour, have so many scenes which do nothing, in terms of moving the plot forward or generating atmosphere? It’s almost impressive, in a kind of anti-film, Dogme 95 kind of way. Key word: almost. There’s an old line about a film being so bad, you would walk out if it was an in-flight movie. I watched this on a plane going from London to Inverness. That joke is no longer very funny, and I am no longer welcome on British Airways.