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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 3 March 2013
This article is a review of THE BAY.
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“Maybe you should’ve got a voice actor, or something?” Donna Thompson
Who doesn’t love a virus thriller? CONTAGION and OUTBREAK have their pleasures. The thought of director Barry Levinson (YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES and BUGSY) tackling an ecological horror filled with me anticipation. Don’t forget he did executive produce one of the greatest cop shows of all time – HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET. However, THE BAY is dead on arrival. Using the tired found footage formula, he creates a banal 84 or so minutes of people acting badly, spouting leaden dialogue. Framed with a former student news reporter looking back to the 4th July celebrations in 2009, at Claridge, Maryland, the town of Chesapeake Bay, population 6,200, has two main industries – chicken rearing and summer tourism. We witness over one day the annihilation of a community, in clunky, cliché fashion.
Who doesn’t love a virus thriller? CONTAGION and OUTBREAK have their pleasures. The thought of director Barry Levinson (YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES and BUGSY) tackling an ecological horror filled with me anticipation. Don’t forget he did executive produce one of the greatest cop shows of all time – HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET. However, THE BAY is dead on arrival. Using the tired found footage formula, he creates a banal 84 or so minutes of people acting badly, spouting leaden dialogue. Framed with a former student news reporter looking back to the 4th July celebrations in 2009, at Claridge, Maryland, the town of Chesapeake Bay, population 6,200, has two main industries – chicken rearing and summer tourism. We witness over one day the annihilation of a community, in clunky, cliché fashion.
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The usual disaster movie tope of the authorities ignoring prior warnings are all in place. A perfect storm of:
- Tonnes of chicken faeces being dumped into the bay,
- Their effluent containing the growth accelerant they are fed,
- An ineffective desalination plant aimed at filtering the town’s water supply, and
- A radiation leak.
These come together to create devastating flesh eating parasites. The entire population start suffering the effects of being eaten from the inside at the same time.
Instead of the government stepping in to help, they shut down telecommunications, deny all knowledge, and brush the incident under the carpet. This ex-student television reporter, Donna Thompson, is being interviewed, while also narrating the footage that has been accumulated from various sources – CCTV, news, phones, etc. She proves to be a most annoying host, stating the obvious and telling us how sad this all is. George Romero got stick in some quarters for his DIARY OF THE DEAD, but that zombie-fest is a stone-cold classic compared to THE BAY. The latter reminds of another misfire from a renowned director, Lawrence Kasdan’s DREAMCATCHER – a mess that involved, I kid you not, “sh*t weasel” alien parasites.
A horror crime, in my book, is that the “isopod” critters don’t do anything consistently scary. When we see them, they are usually already dead, or just moving about in a caught fish. We are shown a photo of a two-foot one, which, we are told, tried to burrow its way into a submarine. Hello! WTF?! Why we are not witnessing those versions causing mayhem?
Corporate and government malfeasance damaging the environment is a commentary tied to a lacklustre story, extremely poorly executed. A real shame.
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