KAOS Brief, The (2017)
Starring Drew Lipson, Charlie Morgan Patton, Marco DelVecchio
Directed by JP Mandarino
I figure that if I maybe called the witness protection program, they could at the LEAST put me in touch with someone that could shield me. You see, it follows (no, I’m not talking about the sex and death flick) – I’m talking about something infinitely more sinister, more evil, more unforgiving to the eyes that lay upon it…I’m going to whisper this so as to not draw a whole lot of attention – “found footage films.” There, now that the cursed verbiage has been uttered, I can start to delve into director JP Mandarino’s latest, The KAOS Brief, and all the shaky, rattletrapped visuals that come with it – double-fasten your puke-guards, kids, cause this ride’s gonna be a bumpy one.
With the advent of every Tom, Dick, and Harry putting up their own channel on the internet in a half-assed way of attempting to attain a hint of celeb status (and frighteningly a lot having great success), we follow pseudo-star Skylar (Lipson) as he films a milestone vlog episode, and breaks news that he’s going on a camping trip with his boyfriend, his sister and her fella (trust me, out there, there ARE some people that would actually care about such news). So the group packs up the SUV and heads out to a remote campsite, drone in tow (of course), and after seeing some mysterious lights in the sky, they awake to find some weird, Blair-Witch type redecoration done to their rest area – anyone else see this coming? Show of hands, please. The nice hook here is that we don’t see the group get trapped in the woods where they’re inexplicably hunted down and wasted – instead, they actually manage to make it home, and once Skylar uploads all the footage of the trip (including said strange lights and alien redecoration) for his online fan club, he starts to receive some strange messages about why he should take that stuff down. Throw in some curious black vehicles parked around his house, and it looks like someone wants to shut Skylar and his pals up for good. Just what exactly did they see, and who’s going through all the trouble to keep them quiet?
Mandarino takes a nice route in getting the band of pals out of the woods after a short time, and instead focusing on the troubles back at the homestead, but things get a bit stagnant as far as from a bystander’s point of view. We’re subject to a litany of dry conversation and even more stale stationary shots from cameras that have been scattered around the house while the “authorities” start to close in on the teens. While the instances that the quartet are put through come off as a bit hokey from time to time, the genuineness and believe ability of their performances is what pulls some scenes out of the mud, and for that I’ve got to give a couple of points for “slow-tempo-breaking.” Overall, The KAOS Brief is one of those flicks that at times will frustrate you, entertain you, not really scare you, but will make you think about what’s out there…let’s just hope for our sake that it’s not all caught in such damned shaky fashion.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
