Hollow (2011)
Directed by: Michael Axelgaard
Written by: Matthew Holt
Starring: Emily Plumtree, Jessica Ellerby, Matt Stokoe, Sam Stockman
Hollow (2011)
(15) Running time: 91 minutes
Director: Michael Axelgaard
Writer: Matthew Holt
Cast: Emily Plumtree, Sam Stockman, Jessica Ellerby, Matt Stokoe
Reviewed by: Matt Wavish
I love found footage horror, and while these days the bad one’s are beginning to outweigh the good ones, I am still willing to watch any I can get my hands on. Sometimes I will come across an inventive, clever and quite brilliant found footage horror (recently V/H/S, The Bay, Apollo 18, Troll Hunter) and more often than not these days I come across a right stinker. Hollow, a British found footage horror flick, borders on being a right stinker, but narrowly misses thanks to a creepy location and a silly but interesting idea. The evil in this film comes from a large tree, and while that might just sound like a comedy, there is a small smidgen of chills which come from this idea, and the tree itself manages to conjure up some mild level of menace.
The film see’s a group of four friends taking a trip to the countryside in Suffolk, England and spending their holiday in a country house, all the time filming the events. While there they get drunk, fool around and one even displays some sort of obsession with the cute blonde by leaving his camera on record while she undresses. To say the relationships are weird is an understatement. There are a boyfriend and girlfriend couple, and we witness the boyfriend proposing to his girlfriend, but it doesn’t seem very serious. Later on the same guy is constantly flirting with the blonde, much to the disgust of his new fiancée. It is never really explained why he suddenly has a ‘thing’ for the blonde (good looking as she is!), and I guess we are supposed to think this is all the doings of the tree.
The friends also learn that an ancient evil cursed the local village, and the local monastery, and it all leads to this large, menacing tree where some of those affected have hung themselves. Inside the trees ‘hollow’ is where many of these strange events take place, and the four friends are heading right for it. The evil seems to have taken hold of these holiday makers, and we are lead to believe that they are under either some sort of spell, or constantly drunk, it is hard to tell.
The film is made up of the group bickering, arguing and generally being annoying. The camera shakes and falls on the floor, and whizzes round to see something that isn’t actually there. The script struggles, and for some insane reason is stretched to its absolute limit rather than getting right to the point. So-called scare moments linger for way too long, and there are far too many build ups to nothing at all. Much of the film is shot at night, and so we never really get to see anything, and most of the scares rely on the dark to create tension, but it never really delivers.
The scariest moments come from someone’s jacket, or (cleverly) from one girls asthma. There are some impressive ideas here, and it is clear the director had every intention to scare his audience, but Hollow suffers from trying way too hard and sadly is far too ambitious for its own good. The found footage is a neat trick of hiding the films low budget, but is not an excuse for loooong scare tactics and unnecessary drawn out moments of tension which quickly wither away. A baffling ending which you would have spotted from the opening credits manages to leave a lasting impression, but of being cheated rather than scared. There is very little to actually like here, and yes the setting is creepy and the idea may have worked, but here is yet further proof that the found footage genre is very quickly running out of steam.
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