Ten Days of Terror!: Lovely Molly

Film: Lovely Molly
Format: DVD from Putnam County Public Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

Sometimes I don’t know how to start a review. In the case of Lovely Molly, the problem is that I don’t know where to start. There’s absolutely a story here and an atmosphere of strangeness and dread. The problem is that I’m not sure I understand the entire story. It’s an interesting set of choices that come together in Lovely Molly that make the film slightly more realistic in a certain sense, but also more frustrating. We’ll get to that before the end, I promise.

Most of the film is going to be told in flashback. It opens with the titular Molly (Gretchen Lodge) talking to us on a video camera. She’s desperately trying to kill herself, but tells the camera that she is being prevented. We’re not quite going to get back to this point, but we’ll get close to it through the rest of the film. We are going to go back to the beginning of the tale, though, when Molly doesn’t look quite so feral.

Lost in the Woods

Film: The Blair Witch Project
Format: DVD from Morris Area Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

The first time I tried to watch The Blair Witch Project I couldn’t get through it. The reason was simple—the constant hand-held camera work nauseated me. I don’t mean that I didn’t like it—I mean it literally made me feel sick to my stomach. I considered taking Dramamine to counter it. I didn’t and I did manage to make it through. It’s a film I’ve been planning to see for some time. My brother Tom, who is also going through The List on his own terms, considers this one of the scariest films he’s ever seen.

I’ll disagree with him on that. I don’t disagree that there’s some boo factor here, but I found The Blair Witch Project a lot more unsettling than actually scary. The genius of the found footage genre—the genre that this film started—is that it’s low cost and shows only exactly what you can legitimately suggest to the viewers that the person holding the camera would see. Because of this, the film (and generally the genre) depends on the idea that what you don’t see is scarier than what you do. We’re in luck with this one—this film is smart enough that what we don’t see really does have some scare factor.