Review by Tristan Bishop
The coming-of-age tale is one that pops up again and again within the horror genre. It’s not hard to see why – we were all young once, and having young characters dealing with unimaginable horrors is a good metaphor for the way the world reveals more unpleasant aspects to us as we grow up. The film adaptation of Stephen King’s Stand By Me/The Body (1986) and the television mini-series of the same author’s It (1990) remain pretty much the definitive works of the subgenre, and in more recent years such critical and commercial successes as Let The Right One In (2008) and Super 8 (2011) have continued to keep such tales in the public eye. Now along comes Found (don’t run away just yet, this isn’t actually a found footage movie!) adapted from a novel by Todd Rigney by first-time feature writer/director Scott Schirmer, which promises to put a darker spin on the subject matter, arriving on a wave of awards from horror festivals (15 best picture awards, if IMDB is to be believed) and with a welcome boost (for a horror movie at least) of publicity, as the film has been banned outright in Australia (‘prolonged and detailed descriptions of sexual violence’) and censored of a few seconds in the UK (for an erect penis during one of these scenes, no less).
Found certainly grabs our attention at the outset. We meet Marty, an 11 year boy (played by Gavin Brown), lonely, bullied at school and taking refuge in horror films and comics. Marty has discovered that his older brother has an unusual hobby – he kills and collects the heads of (mostly) African American women. Marty keeps this secret to himself, but regularly dons washing-up gloves and sneaks into his brother’s room to investigate the heads kept in a bowling bag.
Aside from having a prolific serial killer for a brother, Marty’s life isn’t all that great either. His father is an argumentative racist (something which appears to have influenced his older brother’s nocturnal activities), and he is picked on at school, which in turn causes the one friend he has to turn his back on him in order to not get caught up in the abuse from his classmates. In the midst of all this Marty’s bond with his brother begins to strengthen, but will his brother’s brand of protection be more problematic than helpful, and will Marty be forced to become complicit in his brother’s crimes?
There’s no doubt that Found stands apart from the pack with an interesting premise and approach: there’s no creeping realisation of the brother’s crimes here, we’re shown what’s going on from the beginning, and the film instead deals with the way the discovery plays in with other events in Marty’s life. The opening scene is genuinely disturbing in the way it plays the gruesome find matter-of-factly, and is probably the most arresting start to a film I have seen this year. Unfortunately after such a solid start the film starts to show a lot of weaknesses, most notably in the acting department. Aside from an impressive turn from Gavin Brown as Marty, the rest of the cast are strictly amateur hour – and it suffers from an underdeveloped script which brings up several interesting topics (racism, escapism through horror, dysfunctional family) but then fails to explore them in any meaningful way.
Added to this, the film just isn’t shot very well – the look is extremely uneven, and whilst some scenes are presented perfectly nicely, others just look a bit naff, with the biggest crime coming from the film-within-a-film entitled ‘Headless’ (which Marty discovers in his brother’s VHS stash), which is totally era-inappropriate, looking like the worst shot-on-DV gore flick you’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen one or two in my time). The era the film is supposed to be set in – the presence of VHS technology and mostly 80’s/90’s film posters (Without Warning, Popcorn) on the brother’s walls suggest a retro setting, but the look of ‘Headless’ (and the presence of a poster for the insane 2001 Japanese zombie flick Wild Zero) serve to bring the viewer out of the spell and badly affect the tone of proceedings.
The negative attention previously mentioned seems odd too. The BBFC’s edit makes sense from the point of view of their guidelines, but quite why it was banned in Australia I have little idea – whilst the themes and actions onscreen are grim enough, the film just isn’t well-made enough to have much impact in that area, and any onscreen gore is entirely unconvincing.
Oddly enough, despite all the myriad shortcomings, the film remains strangely likeable; it’s obviously been made with passion, and it’s rare to see a horror film that approaches things in a new way. It certainly kept me glued to it to see where it was going next – quite the feat as I originally stuck on the screener intending to watch half an hour before bed and ended up staying up late to finish it off. Found ends up as a laudable, interesting failure, but if you’re able to dig beneath the slapdash surface you’ll find a film made with (an admittedly jet black) heart which stays true to itself right to the end, and that’s definitely something to applaud.
Found is released to Region 2 DVD on 20th October, from Monster Pictures.