THE OUTWATERS (2022)

Studio:     Cinedigm
Director:    Robbie Banfitch
Writer:     Robbie Banfitch
Producer:  Robbie Banfitch, Beau J. Genot
Stars:     Angela Basolis, Robbie Banfitch, Scott Schamell, Michelle May, Leslie Ann Banfitch, Aro Caitlin

Review Score:

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Summary:

Four friends encounter terrifyingly inexplicable phenomena while hiking in the Mojave Desert.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In August of 2017, filmmaker Robbie Zagorac records a trip to the Mojave Desert with his brother Scott Zagorac and their friend Angela Bocuzzi so they can shoot a music video for their other friend Michelle August. On their first night camping in tents, the quartet is woken by unsettling noises and strange flashes in the sky that they presume are from a nearby storm.

In the morning, Robbie investigates a hole in the ground he saw created by a flash of light during the night. Robbie records unnerving sounds emanating from underground.

During another night of odd noises and lights, a bloody figure armed with an ax seemingly attacks everyone. The next day, Robbie finds his friends missing and his mind scrambled. Robbie spies a shrieking tentacle creature slithering away.

While suffering from otherworldly visions of gruesome viscera, Robbie experiences a series of encounters with bloody figures who include Michelle, Angela, Scott, and his mother Leslie Ann. Seemingly traveling between two worlds, Robbie peels a membrane off of his bloody body. Robbie later encounters a bloody doppelganger of himself brandishing an ax. After finally finding Scott, Angela, and Michelle’s severed heads on pikes, Robbie cuts open his stomach and continues stumbling through the desert carrying his exposed intestines.

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Review:

Call it a case of having been around the buzz block one too many times.  Call it old-fashioned skepticism.  Whatever it is, I’m too cynical to buy into any manufactured “word of mouth” deliberately disguised as grassroots marketing hyping up an otherwise negligible B-movie.

Savvy eyes that spy these same shilling shenanigans know what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about low-rent DIY efforts propped up by phony 10/10 user reviews from IMDb accounts that are only a day old.  I’m talking about indies whose producers exploit personal friendships with magazine and website editors to drum up biased coverage no readers were clamoring for.  I’m talking about “The Outwaters,” a micro-movie where the only thing keeping it from exile in a DTV wasteland is the suspicious spin prominent people in the genre space eagerly offer to promote it as a major event in horror entertainment.  Let me assure you, it is not.

Genre journalists and their gushing tastemakers aren’t solely to blame for the bubble of bloated blather surrounding “The Outwaters.”  More unknowingly, mainstream media members boarded First Class cars on the train that invented an illusion of overwhelmingly positive praise, too.

What happens is that everyday outlets afford such little attention to horror on a regular basis that when an exception pokes into their purview, they jump to inaccurate conclusions based on a cursory perusal of hashtags that were ballot-stuffed into temporary Twitter trends.  Anything over their heads, they then assume, “I guess horror fans like garbled noises and surreal imagery” and give it a glowing review because that’s safer than admitting the pointlessness and risking a position on the wrong side of popular opinion, even though that opinion is poisoned by disingenuous hullabaloo.  It happened with “Skinamarink” (review here) and now with “The Outwaters,” a movie those mainstream critics liken to “The Blair Witch Project” because they’re so far out of the loop, they have no other unit of measurement for a “found footage” film about friends going missing under mysterious circumstances than a faded phenomenon that’s now about a quarter of a century old.

Like “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Outwaters” starts with an aimless Act One of banal fluff, except there’s more of it than even “The Blair Witch Project” had.  “The Outwaters” might even have more unnecessary exposition than any other “found footage” film in history, and that’s saying something considering how awful the subgenre has been as a whole.

Meet Scott.  He’s the brother of Robbie, the man holding the camera.  Scott is celebrating his birthday, which you’d think would be a notable plot point since his introduction is the first full scene of the film.  Turns out, his birthday has nothing to do with anything, a common trait shared by most beats in the threadbare story, which is really only a setup for a rough cut, and I mean rough, of experimental eeriness in the last act.

Robbie’s bigger priority appears to be Michelle, an aspiring singer mourning her mother’s death, two more tidbits given attention without much meaningful payoff.  Maybe she is Robbie’s girlfriend; it’s not made crystal clear.  It’s also not clear how fourth friend Angela has somehow never heard a thunderstorm before, even though she hails from New Jersey.  Everyone is on their way to the desert to film a music video for Michelle, although they never actually record any footage for said video, so who can really be sure about why they went there either.

The first half hour fills up on inconsequential dialogue, a side visit to Scott and Robbie’s mother, and random inserts of candles on cake, rain puddles, and long shots looking out a plane window.  I tried to picture a conversation between the director and editor regarding why they wanted/needed a full ten seconds of an airplane wing followed by ten more seconds of mountains in the distance.  End credits later informed me “The Outwaters” is homemade horror of the one-man-show variety, as its director, writer, producer, cinematographer, editor, sound designer, special fx creator, and lead actor are the same person.  It’s hard to reign in indulgent impulses when you don’t have anyone who ever says “no.”

35 snoozy minutes pass until “The Outwaters” finally gets its first vague whiff of horror when Robbie spots an ax in the ground.  Then it’s right back to copious cutaways of B-roll burros staring at the camera, Scott sunbathing, and Robbie simply picking up handfuls of sand to pour the grains through his fingers, perhaps symbolic of the wasted minutes ticking away within an intangible hourglass of time misspent on subpar movies.

Eventually, and that single word can essentially stand in as a summary for the film’s entirely evaporative first hour, “The Outwaters” switches over to 45 minutes of gruesome gore, bloody bodies, hallucinatory visions, and suggestions of otherworldly creatures.  When you can see any of it, that is.  Most of the footage is pitch-black nothingness, shakier than a James Bond martini, fuzzy from having the lens jammed up against whatever’s in frame, or all three at once.  For someone who is supposed to be a professional videographer, Robbie can’t shoot for sh*t.

With only marginally more of a linear narrative than “Skinamarink,” and only marginally more watchable as an exercise in improvisational atmosphere, “The Outwaters” accomplishes the impossible by making me long for the comparatively less exhausting endurance test of a formulaic haunted hospital investigation.  All it takes is scissors and tape to rearrange irrelevant sequences in any order you wish and it would make no material difference to how the stream-of-consciousness storyline plays out.

Don’t necessarily take my word for it.  Alternatively, you could take the word of someone trying to tell you it’s a must-see milestone harkening back to “found footage’s” heyday.  Let’s just circle back after some time has settled and pinpoint precisely where “The Outwaters” lands on lists of memorable movies.  I’m willing to bet we can conclude claims of supposedly superlative scariness were a crock.

Review Score: 20

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