It had been a hot minute since I had last watched a found footage horror for review so I was ready to give the Jose Prendes (Monster Mash) directed and Ryan Ebert written Heretics a fair chance. This was very old school in how it was created and unfortunately that meant there was a lot to dislike here.
A bunch of teenage friends are having a drunken garden party one evening. With the alcohol flowing and the friends running out of ideas for what to do, one of them suggests that they head to the abandoned Simmons estate (no relation, my surname is 'Simmonds'!). It is a local place rumoured to be inhabited by crazy homeless people, which teens in the area visit as a test of their courage, to see if they can last the night there. Things briefly go well, but it isn't too long before the group find themselves under assault from a group of murderous demon worshipping cultists.
Firstly, I thought how the found footage aspect was presented was different to the normal way. There is some text at film's start but instead of stating the following was to be recovered footage found it is instead praising a demon named Lilith. I thought that screen and the one at the end of Heretics was probably the best idea here. This falls into all the usual generic tropes of the genre. It begins with a far too long introduction, twenty seven minutes of dumb teenagers playing drinking games and flirting might have intended to give the characters some fleshing out, but it just made me dislike them more than I would have without that part. By the half hour mark the teens have finally got to the abandoned house, I noted that it was thirty three minutes when the first moment that could be considered horror happened, and from here it is somehow all downhill.
Things progress predictably, lots of people filming for absolutely no reason, the scared teens constantly running into the basement rather than making any attempt to break the multitude of weak looking windows in the house proper, constant excuses as to why they shouldn't just try and escape, and then the third act. Third act goes full shaky cam, lots of really blurry and hard to see scenes put against static camera recordings that were so dark it was hard to make much out. This wasn't exciting, instead the most action packed section of the film felt plain dull.
There were too many characters to care about, none of which had much personality to them. Stand-out was Eva (Neeley Dayan), only because her being the only religious character made her easier to remember than the rest of the idiotic teens. I also enjoyed seeing prolific actor Eric Roberts (Devil's Knight, Down Below) in a small role here. I assume a lot of the dialogue was improvised as it was mainly made up of characters saying the same things in different ways over and over again. A bit where Jessica (Shelby Wright) films a video message for her parents while sniffling was a blatant homage to The Blair Witch Project, making me roll my eyes. The cultists unfortunately came across as comically cartoonish. When they first appeared, climbing through windows they briefly looked like a threat as it appeared they were wearing balaclavas so seemed intimidating. It soon became clear they were idiots too, black robed and wearing goofy black masks, it was hard to take them seriously, not helped by their bumbling around and Scooby-Doo type reveals of who they actually were. One thing Heretics does get right is the amount of on-screen deaths, with a large cast comes a large body count thankfully, and the sticky looking red blood looked good on screen.
Heretics had little bursts of good ideas but all too often it was content to be a derivative copy of found footages from before. This wasn't all terrible, and if for some reason you are in the mood for a brain dead found footage then Heretics will be right up your street.
SCORE:
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