Angus Valley Farms (2005)

Posted on Dec 13, 2006 under "Cold", Horror |

Directed by Jeremy Isbell
Starring
- Jeremy Isbell
- Zuriel Noveskey
- Tosha Jennings
- Sara Shoulders
- Travis Azbill
Produced by Melissa Sisson and Sacre
Executive produced by Noelle Hill, Sacre, and William Hill

Between the last movie from Central Film Co. I reviewed and this one, I got an email from CFC’s new publicist, asking for a mailing address to which she could send DVD screeners. Apparently she hadn’t realized that I’ve previously reviewed CFC releases here, here, and here, movies so appallingly bad that watching the three in quick succession could rupture the very fabric of the space-time continuum with their combined Suck. I didn’t respond to her; she may indeed be a very nice person, and I could think of no way to gently tell her that the movies she was hawking would, in a just world, earn her a one-way ticket to Gitmo.

Angus Valley Farms is the last of the CFC screeners on my shelf, and while it still demonstrates multidimensional suckitude on every level, the fact that I was at last finishing a sorry chapter in my life as a reviewer helped to mitigate the pain. And perhaps this movie was slightly less aggressively bad than the others; it’s a Blair Witch Project wanna-be, which, to our enthusiastic cadre of filmmakers, apparently means “Shoot random shit without a plan for about an hour and call it a movie.” It’s a sad, sad statement on the filmmaking acumen of those involved that fifty minutes of shapeless ad-libbed footage is marginally less craptastic than their attempts at intentional cinema.

The movie opens with two sequences of “survivor interviews” concerning Angus Valley Farms (this year’s winner for “Least Spooky-Sounding Haunted Location”). In this alternate version of the English language, “survivor” apparently means “local person who heard something about the Farms once and can relay some half-remembered rumors.” At least, I think that’s what the first woman was talking about; director Jeremy Asbill was so concerned with adding pointless “film-scratch” effects to his intentionally shaky handheld video footage that he never bothered to mic the interview sequence properly, so what we get is three minutes of GUY BEHIND THE CAMERA ASKING SOME ILL-PHRASED QUESTION ABOUT ANGUS VALLEY FARMS followed by mumble mumble this guy mumble so I heard mumble mumble I guess and then by ANOTHER DUMB QUESTION ABOUT THE FARMS. The second survivor interview is much clearer, so that we can hear the second girl tell us that it’s spooky, it’s spooky, the farm is really spooky, she’d never go back there, it’s so spooky, gosh it’s spooky.

iF YOU SEE THE PLOT, SEND iT THiS WAY

The mood thus appropriately set, we get a brief scene of Jeremy Asbill talking to a real estate agent getting permission to go look around the rundown farm. The agent helpfully volunteers that they’re desperate to sell the place because there’s been history of trouble and people freaking out (way to chase that commission!), and that as long as they don’t loot the place or torch it, they’re welcome to it.

So. Two guys and four girls get out of the car at Angus Valley Farms (ooh, a helpful on-screen title for those in the audience to stupid to assume that the rundown farm we’re looking at is the farm everyone’s been talking about going to for the last ten minutes) and start wandering around. The stupid film-scratch effect has mercifully been dropped (extra-good because the real estate agent scene featured full-frame scratches superimposed over letterboxed video footage), and heck, while we’re at it, let’s drop most of our cast. Because almost immediately, it is instead the middle of the night instead of broad daylight, the only people there are one guy behind the camera and one guy in front of it, and they proceed to meander around, filming stuff at random in the trashed buildings, for over half an hour.

Seriously. That’s the bulk of the running time: Two guys, one flashlight, one camera, and no point. They wander in, they wander upstairs, they wander downstairs, they mention a couple of stories about murders that they only half-remember, they get shots of bottles, they get shots of toilets, they express amazement over graffiti, and, as an added bonus, they act all freaked out by lights in the sky — lights which, even on the murky videotape, are very obviously rotating floodlights from some car dealerships Midnite Madness Sale a couple of miles away. The camera mic proves inadequate to pick up either person’s muttered comments very well, and the soundtrack is filled in by growling “dark ambient” music.

Sometimes, a picture says a thousand words.

I repeat, this is all we’re given for over half an hour in which nothing actually happens. But then, for a change, we cut to daylight, in which the guys (now mysteriously re-accompanied by the girls) shoot more footage. Of nothing. Look, an overgrown orchard! Look, a well! Look, the overgrown orchard again!

Then they’re wandering through a cemetery. Not some overgrown family plot connected to the farms, mind you, but a typical suburban cemetery with cars whizzing along the roads in the background. They wander through, looking around as if they also are wondering, “What the hell are we doing here?” And finally, something happens.

No, really! Something happens! For no apparent reason, an old black man wearing a Gilligan hat appears in front of them and asks them why they’re there and what they hope to find. The only thing that makes this scene notable (aside from the old man articulating the question that anyone watching this dreck has been demanding to know for forty minutes) is that the old man was shot under interior lights against a bluescreen, then superimposed semi-transparently on the sunny cemetery exterior. One might entertain the possibility that this guy is a ghost or something, but the reaction of the characters doesn’t support this. Instead of screaming, “HOLY CRIMINY, SOME SPOOKY SEE-THROUGH GUY IS TALKING TO US IN THE CEMETERY!!” they simply wait until the old man disappears and then look at each other with befuddlement and say things like, “What was that old man talking about?”

“You maybe a phantom, but you are no match for our Suck-based powers!”

By the way, none of the characters are holding the camera any more; we’ve simply given up on that whole “found footage” cinema verite thing. Not that the video work gets any less shaky or improvised.

I guess strolling through the cemetery got old, because next thing we see is their car pulling up at an apartment complex, with the helpful title superimposed, “Jack’s Place.” Which is notable mainly because it’s the first we’ve heard of any of these characters’ names. And given the fact that director/star Jeremy Asbill unlocks the door, we can safely conclude that this, indeed, is Jack. Boy, that plot’s sure cooking now!

Once inside, Jack goes into the kitchenette, while the remaining guy and four girls sit on the couch, pass around beers, and talk about their experience so far. Boy wasn’t that spooky? Gosh, that was so spooky. And that old man, wasn’t he weird? Yeah, I’ll say! It’s a good thing that no one manages to say anything important in their ad-libbed dialogue because, once again, no one bothered to set up a mic or anything. Nor does the camera operator know who’s going to speak next, so the lens continually pans back and forth, invariably missing speakers and instead focusing on silent people listening.

And again, things start happening. Yes! Oh, yes! One girl, drunk now, gets up to go downstairs to take a shower, because that’s what drunk people do; another girl accompanies her. (Don’t get your hopes up, fanboy. No lesbian shower scene.) Then one other girl and the remaining guy decide they want to go somewhere else and get snuggly. And the last girl joins Jack in the kitchen, where Jack has a bottle that he brought back from the farm as a souvenir, even though you’re not supposed to take anything. Jack opens the cap of the bottle, and there’s this digitally-superimposed explosion at the mouth of the bottle, and suddenly he knocks the girl to the floor and starts grimacing into the camera and growling in his “possessed” voice about taking something from Angus Valley Farms means they’re cursed! They’re all cursed! They’re all going to die!

“See how possessed I am? I’m THIS possessed!”

Then he pulls out a convenient machete, and kills her. And by “kills,” I mean that he swings the machete and then we cut away tastefully. No, wait — we cut away cheaply. Then the girl who was helping the drunk girl down to the shower walks in, and he kills her.

Then he goes downstairs to where the amorous couple are just barely starting to disrobe, and “kills” them. And then he “kills” the girl just getting out of the shower. (In fact, he comes out of the shower AFTER her, because all basement showers have a door directly to the outside for easy access.) Then he kills himself with the machete, while digital flames are superimposed all around.

Wow. Forty-five minutes of utter boredom, and then every character is killed in under five minutes. (Not that that negates the utter boredom, though; rather the deaths are concurrent with the continuation of said boredom.)

And last of all, the old black man comes into the house and retrieves his bottle.

Fifty minutes, the credits roll, and your humble reviewer stares aghast at the screen, scarcely willing to credit his senses as to the sheer weight of The Suck that I have just witnessed.

“Ooh baby, water heaters get me soooo hot…”

I still can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that members of the human race with sufficient mental facilities to operate a video camera and walk bipedally could entertain the delusion that what they have just foisted off upon the world (or even the miniscule segment thereof which will ever see the finished product) was in any way worth the effort of showing it to anybody. I will grant you, there may indeed be thousands of people running free in the U. S. of A. who are similarly bereft of any of the talent necessary to craft even a mediocre motion picture. But I’m guessing that very few of them have any desire to make a movie in the first place, and and even of those few, almost none are also devoted to finishing their unwatchable pet projects. What we have here, then, is the almost infinitesmal overlap between the commitment to finish a project and the utter dearth of the native ability to do it right. There are several thousand independent film projects begun and abandoned every year; this deserved to be one of them.

So I guess that, if PR Girl from CFC ever runs across this review, she can take it as the overlong answer to her query: No, I will not willingly subject myself to another release from the Central Film Co. In fact, at this stage of the game I’d be ready to pay you NOT to send me any.