Strawberry Estates (2001)

May 18, 2005

by Nathan Shumate

Written and directed by Ron Bonk
Starring
- Lisa Chelezna
- Chrissy Frick
- Bob Fullenbaum
- Jason Reed
- Carl Russo
Produced by Ron Bonk and Jerry O’Sullivan

Imagine, for a moment, you’re Ron Bonk, microbudget director and distributor via Sub Rosa Studios. You’ve had a tremendous idea for a low-budget horror film that relies on the very technology that is often a limitation: video cameras. You come up with a feature film concept that tries to pass itself off as cinema verite found footage, the remains of a documentary film shoot gone horribly awry. As such, you can present your tale starkly, with no music and minimal editing, and keep your horrors offscreen and indirect for most of the running time, relying on subtlety and character reaction to convey disquiet and foreboding.

You shoot a good chunk of the feature, but there are numerous technical problems that stall the production, and you’re not entirely happy with the footage you’ve shot. Should you soldier on with a second shoot? Should you scrap what you’ve got and start over, fine-tuning the script and the cast before doing so?

And while you’re weighing your options… a little pseudo-documentary called The Blair Witch Project hits festivals and cinemas and does gangbuster business.

Well, crap.

“I’m Professor Laurel, and yes, my other jacket has leather elbow patches.”

For several years thereafter, Bonk let the project lie fallow (it’s okay, you can stop pretending you’re Ron Bonk now), but it proved too enticing to abandon permanently. So Bonk remounted the production with a new cast and more reliable equipment, and finally made Strawberry Estates.

The “eye” of the camera will spend most of the movie in the hands of Jason (Jason Reed), a budding filmmaker who’s been hired as the videographer for a university-funded expedition. Professor Laurel (Bob Fullenbaum) is planning to explore the secrets of the Smith Garret Building, aka “Strawberry Estates,” a local manse of long history and unsettling reputation. Having started out in the late 1800s as a home for the downtrodden on an area of land that the local Indians had used for “dreamquest”-style initiations, the institutional-sized building had been used as a charitable institution, an asylum (several times), a hospital, and a retirement home over the last century. But it always held tragedy for the successive members of the Garrett family who owned it, and a host of traumas for many of its residents and inmates. Now the expedition is planning to lock themselves in the building for three days as they shoot their documentary and try to tease out the building’s secrets.

All of this is information pieced out to us little by little. More immediately, we meet our team:

“Hi. I’m the face that mercifully stays behind the camera most of the time.”

Jason immediately presents himself as an unbeliever, only along for the filmmaking experience. He also reveals himself to be something of a conniver, and a liar for convenience’s sake, especially when spending three days away from his girlfriend.

Professor Laurel affects the kind of stentorian collegiate tones that are common to movie professors but are never (in my experience) used by real ones. He’s also something of a manipulator of the “control freak” variety, a character flaw that blossoms into full-blown megalomania under the stresses to come.

Laurel’s star pupil Sarah (Chrissy Frick), a nice girl who’s there mostly to get good grades.

Noted psychic Jennifer Brahms (Lisa Chelezna), who’s along for the ride not only because of her abilities, but because her own mother died after only one day of a similar venture twenty-five years ago. That makes it personal.

“I’m doing a psychic reading… of the script.”

What we have, then, is four people of varying degrees of faith in the supernatural, trying to discover if Strawberry Estates is, as the professor believes, a gateway to the other side. And as we all know from watching these movies, that’s a question that never has a good answer.

As with BWP, the focus is largely on character interaction and cinematic misdirection, so giving a blow-by-blow plot description is not only tedious, but unnecessary. It’s a character movie, and Bonk should be commended for assembling a team of actors that are… almost as good as they needed to be.

That’s not entirely a criticism of the actors themselves, mind you. The cast of BWP did a phenomenal job ad-libbing their roles, but much of the credit there has to go also to a premise which gave us three student actors playing three student filmmakers — not a terrible stretch. Here, the two actors playing students and filmmakers (Jason Reed and Chrissy Frick) are usually believable and natural, even in overlong conversations about the existence of God and such. (Though the scene in which Jason tries to get Sarah to sleep with him by telling her about how his parents died in a car crash is almost too awkward for words.) By contrast, as the roles get farther from the actors’ personal experience, the performances become less credible. Professor Laurel’s descent into frenzied authoritarianism is undermined by the cartoony version of academia with which Bob Fullenbaum portrays him from the beginning. And Lisa Chelezna plays Jennifer with the stilted diction of a late-nite psychic hotline infomercial.

Down the hall, first left after the coat closet.

The script, too, is much too… scripted. Ideally, there should be a massive contrast between Laurel’s monologues for the documentary, shot in the style of a PBS narrator, and the more natural casual interactions which make up the rest of the movie, but too often the supposedly “natural” dialogue sounds better suited to the page than the ear.

Technical decisions show some of the same unevenness. The cinema verite style is very effective for the most part, allowing shock pans and dropped-camera effects at appropriate junctures. Then, puncturing all of that, Bonk allowed himself to layer in echoing vocal effects over a scene in which Jennifer channels a wandering spirit, effects that would have seemed cheesy even in a movie which had allowed itself a much higher level of acknowledged artifice. The camera’s night vision capabilities are used to render a few scenes in spooky and underlit green; but when Jason finds himself surrounded by shadowy figures at the climax, their eyes shining like a cats, the unassuming street garb of those figures works against the tension that has been building. These are the legions of hell? Sure, if hell is all about comfy and casual.

(I do have to note, though, that this movie provides the best rationale for a cameraman to continue to carry his camera during the mad dash of the finale: Because the camcorder light, and later the night vision, are his only means of seeing in the dark.)

“Beware! Beware the Foreshortened Finger of Disapproval!”

The final tally still puts The Blair Witch Project ahead as a superior movie, and this isn’t a situation in which the existence of BWP prevented Strawberry Estates from enjoying similar acclaim; too much of the character babble sounds just like that, babble, and the characters’ attempts to attach theological underpinnings to the phenomena about them end up muddying the story instead of adding to it. But it’s still a commendable and worthwhile film, most especially because it dedicates itself to something that so few microbudget horror films even attempt: It puts forth the effort to be scary.