Banshee Chapter (2013)
The Gist
Banshees: Katia Winter (Anne); Ted Levine (Thomas); Michael McMillian (James)
My Take: Another found footage flick. Aren’t we over this trend yet? At least it’s done better than PA: The Marked Ones. Anyway, Anne is searching for clues to the bizarre disappearance of her good friend James, who vanished after taking a mysterious drug and filming the effects, which is very brief but kind of creepy in the last shot of James’ film. Anne tracks down the source of the drug or rather where James got it and is led to counter-culture, out spoken writer Thomas Blackburn (to say the flick drew on the Hunter S. Thompson personae would be an understatement). The man likes his drinks, drugs and girls and responds positively to Anne when she approaches him about taking the same drug James used.
It’s full dark when she arrives at Blackburn’s isolated desert home. They banter a bit, he introduces her to his lady friend and then proceeds to dole out the drug. It’s not long before the crazy starts. Lights go out, Blackburn’s lady goes all freaky and he and Anne book it out of the house and drive off into the desert on a psychedelic journey. Well, more like horrifying journey into the truth about the origins of the drug and the government involvement in the experimental mind-altering substance. What happens with Anne kind of left me, going huh? Was she really drugged and it was all a hallucination or was it real?
Final Thoughts: I’m on the fence about this movie. There were defiantly some creepy moments, a couple of good scares but I think it dropped off for me with the introduction of Thomas Blackburn. He was pretty much presented as I would imagine Hunter S. Thompson was like. I get it, why the character was the way he was but it didn’t work for me. The conspiracy about government experiments was fine and what they found in the tank in the desert bunker was also good but it felt so familiar and reminded me in some ways of Devil’s Pass or more recently SPOILERS!!!!! Marvel Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D when Coulson finds the miracle cure that saved him and Skye. This was a decent Netflix pick but it wasn’t great. I probably enjoyed it more watching it late at night by myself and getting startled when my cell phone buzzed. Hey, sometimes anything helps to get scared.
Dawning Creates 
I thought the same thing, it had some shining moments and great ideas but it just didn’t flow good or something.
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I know. It just lost it somewhere.
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