Review: 'The Bay' - You Don't Dump Chicken Shit in the Waters!

How much you'd bitch out over the growing numbers of found-footage movies is not of importance right now. Found-footage is here to stay. Barry Levinson's found-footage The Bay is a vital sign that the sub-genre could still be alive and kicking, especially if first-rate storytelling is promised. Levinson, that Rain Man director Levinson, is unbelievably involved with this kind of project; practically a reminder that you don't dump your chicken shit in the waters. But his approach with the movie is not only refreshing to the sub-genre, but is impressive for itself. But then again, Levinson isn't Levinson for nothing, is he now?

A journalist (Kether Donohue) narrates the horrific events that happened in the 4th of July back in 2009 at Claridge, Maryland where a bacterial outbreak takes the lives of over 700 locales. The film in its entirety is a compilation of retrieved confiscated footage that were taken in the event of the ecological incident. A pair of oceanographers previously known of the forthcoming demise, but are early killed when parasitic organisms crunch out of their bodies. They're demise is rather ignored, and boy how dumb the people today are, believed to be a bull shark incident. No bull shark bite is that messy and little. And if that were a bull, smaller remainders of the victims's bodies will be found. I don't plan to be all Sherlock, but that was exactly what came in the back of this head.

It's not too hard to tell that The Bay is a good movie. We don't get to see dizzying footage of twenty-something individuals, too much light on their faces and close-up, tight, POV shots of their prancing toes. At least we've got that crossed out. But to tell that it is one of the best of horrors this year, like a majority of critics call it, is on a different page, really. Levinson's execution and storytelling is always grand, true enough. And The Bay is well-told, all right. But this is done at the expense of shocks and scares that are naturally expected in movies like this. Nonetheless, I'm pleased to see an epistolary approach, especially in a found-footage film. I bow before Levinson for that, no horse crap.

There are bits of George Romero in this, and a bit of the Speilbergian Jaws. The Bay displays how awful the government could react to situations like this, choosing 700 deaths over the tourism to be put at risk. While the film is occasionally suspenseful, the film's sequences outside blood and exposition is shallow. Conclusively, and technically so, like the Chesapeake Bay, Levinson's ambitious movie is forty percent dead. B
('The Bay' opened on VOD November 2nd. Watch it over Amazon InstantVideo now!)