Hunting for the Hag is the third and final horror film I am watching for review today (at the time of typing). Coincidentally all three films have revolved around the use of social media, something that seems in vogue at the moment. This Paul A. Brooks directed and co-written horror uses a blend of traditional film making and found footage. I stated in my review of Dagr that I was quite in the mood for found footage, that itch had been sated by the time I rolled around to watching this one.
The film opens with Tara (Jasmine Williams) at a police station being interviewed by a lawyer (Daniel Roebuck - 3 From Hell, Phantasm: Ravager) about a tragic event in her recent past that she was the sole survivor of. Tara insists that rather than question her, he should instead watch a video she has edited together from footage her and her friends had shot. That footage is then where the story moves to.
Tara, Beth (Alexa Maris) and Candy (Sierra Renfro - The Last Exorcist) had headed to Illinois, to the location where a woman accused of being a witch was said to have been killed by angry villagers hundreds of years back, and whose evil spirit now curses the land there. The girls plan to make a documentary about the topic for a school project. On the night they visit the supposed site of the historical murder the girls are attacked and taken hostage by three local rednecks, angry Ray (Thomas A. Jackson), cowardly Danny (Brooks), and friendly Clint (Steve Christopher). When it seems like things can't get any worse for the girls, it starts to seem like the legends of the witch might hold some truth to them after all.
In the press release there is a quote from Brooks stating 'I wanted to make a horror movie that toys with your expectations.' In that respect, he does exactly what he stated. This started out feeling like it was going to be a traditional supernatural based found footage. The first thirty seven minutes are purely that, lots of fake camera glitches, characters constantly jump scaring each other, and some really grainy footage. I had my fill of that type of horror with Dagr earlier today, so I wasn't in the mood for more of the same. Much like that movie, this one improves when the slow opening is finally done with. I have to say, the shift into home invasion was something I didn't expect, and it is relatively rare still to get home invasion found footage films. The three antagonists were horrid people, but I liked the actors playing them. I didn't think much of the protagonists. I found their interactions with each other to not feel natural, and it does the terrible thing of characters instantly getting over allegedly close friends deaths, upset for all of a second before acting like that event hadn't even happened. That's not a spoiler, as one thing I did really like was having sole survivor Tara in the prologue instead of the typical black screen with on-screen text saying the footage had been recovered.
The movie culminates in an epilogue that was kind of ridiculous, I can't decide if I was there for that particular twist or not, but was something that I hadn't expected.
The on-screen violence was ok looking, aside from one death scene that was fantastically crazy. Much of the film is in found footage format, there is the prologue and epilogue scenes shot traditionally, and there is a ten minute stretch towards the end of the second act that was filmed normally. The rest is shot with shaky hand cameras, hard to see grainy footage and no end of irritating camera glitches. As much as I hated this style of showing the film, it made the true antagonist looked much better than if they had just appeared on traditional camera. Being chased by a crazy person in a first person perspective is so much more effective than being shown in third person after all. The make-up design for that villain really wasn't the best, but the grainy footage did much to hide that. Better were the sound effects, some really chilling screams are to be found in this film.
Hunting for the Hag has moments of found footage methods that should have been left in the past. Occasionally however there are moments of greatness to be found here also. Look past the bland cookie-cutter protagonists and you have a passable horror whose biggest crime was dedicating so much time to not much at all in the lengthy first act. Hunting for the Hag was released throughout the US and Canada on April 2nd.
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