By Tristan Bishop
If you’re in love with film, you tend to find something to enjoy in nearly every film you watch, whether it be a performance, or camera-work, or (in the case of horror fans), a nice bit of gore. Most films aren’t great, a lot aren’t very good, but there will usually be something to hook the film buff and keep us watching. Once in a while, however, a film comes along that is so misguided in concept and execution that it beggars belief and makes watching the thing a chore. Ladies and gentlemen, I present, The Sigil.
How about this for a set-up? We learn that a mysterious event wiped out 41 people in a house in LA. At the time the government released a statement claiming the disaster was caused by an undiscovered uranium source. Yes. A very very VERY localised uranium source. So localised, that even the house six feet away hasn’t been evacuated. Devan, whose brother died in the house, decides to go on a road trip to the house in order to come to terms with his death (because rooting around in a uranium-rich environment is generally the sane way to deal with grief). She brings along her friend Nate, who brings along his camera-toting friend, as they have decided the journey should be documented on film (yep, this is, at least partially, a found footage film). Nate and Logan, being massive arseholes, decide that the point of the journey is to ‘blow the lid’ on the government conspiracy, rather than to help Devan come to terms with her loss. They attempt to break into the house on arrival, but are stopped by the young neighbour, Miki (played by her namesake Miki Matteson), who takes them aside and reveals that not all of the people in the house that night are dead…
It feels a bit harsh to trash a first feature, but in this case it’s probably well-deserved – a low budget does not mean you can skimp on a script, or some good ideas, and it certainly does not mean you can wheel out the now-tired found footage sequences that have been plaguing the direct-to-DVD market for far too long and expect not to piss off your intended audience. The set-up is patently ridiculous – it’s such an obvious government cover-up that no-one would have believed it, and those involved certainly wouldn’t have just left the house unguarded for any passing conspiracy-theorist to go and have a look. The characters are the biggest bunch of dickheads I’ve had the misfortune to spend 70 minutes with (at least it’s short!) and this is really not helped by amateur performances all-round (excepting the generally OK Matteson – credit where credit is due!). The found footage format is mercifully only used for about 50% of the film, but even this is no real saving grace with a film which even at such a short length feels stretched to breaking point. When the climax does come, there is a twist that, if it had been handled with any amount of skill by the film-makers, could have been rather good, but here it is signposted for a good half of the film, and the climatic sequences themselves are choreographed so ham-fistedly that they elicit no more than a head-slap and groan from the viewer.
So please, first-time directors: if you value your audience and aren’t, as I suspect in this case, contemptuous of horror fans and you’re just latching onto a cheap genre as a way of getting your name out there, get a script, rehearse it until it works, dump the found footage (unless you’re willing to work on other technical aspects such as sound design – which the recent The Entity got right), or at the very least give us a bucket of the red stuff, because we won’t stand for this crap for much longer.