Plot:
Carlos is a director who thinks way too highly of his brand new script, "Le Fear". As he starts putting together a team for the movie his imagination of winning Oscar's and getting global distribution runs free, and he's not shy to tell everyone involved in the making about it, especially the financer. But when they begin filming it turns out that the movie might not be the extraordinary horror movie he said it is, and maybe the crew he has hired isn't as good as they seemed to be at all either.
Our thoughts:
I wasn't really sure what "Le Fear" was gonna be when I got it in the mail. I knew it would be sort of a mockumentary. But I had expected it to be one of those where everything goes wrong because of a killer, a monster, or something like that. I didn't think it was gonna be strictly a comedy. And even though I was surprised by that, I don't think it took away anything from the movie. It's apparent early on that the main purpose of the movie is to make a funny movie about smug, incompetent filmmakers, and not about a terror on a studio. No matter how much I want a good one of those (have you seen the crap out there?). Also, it is important to say that the movie isn't actually a mockumentary. It's filmed like one, but the camera is never acknowledged, there are no interviews with the camera or anything like that. But it plays out exactly like one so I'm gonna be ignorant and call it a mockumentary through-out the review, and judge it as one.
The director and writer of "Le Fear", the film that they are making in "Le Fear", has made a whole bunch of films before but he is now going to make his big break in the movie business. His film is gonna get worldwide distribution and awards. He's sure of it. He manages to convince a financer of this and receives 2 million pounds to make his artistic horror movie with influences from France. Of course, all of this is complete bullshit. The movie he is making won't be winning any awards unless it's "Worst"-something. His confidence manages to scrape a film team together but shit hits the fan when an incompetent director has to work with an incompetent crew.
Your standard stuff, storywise, but it does manage to handle itself pretty good. I mean, it's completely fucking stupid and it knows it. But the strong side of this movie is that the actors usually only shows a bit of the stupidity in their acting, and actually keep straight faces most of the time. As proved in "This Is Spinal Tap" and "The Office", keeping it real with straight faces is hell of a lot more fun than if it goes completely crazy with the stupidity, making it completely unrealistic. Kyri Saphiris who plays the director was probably the best actor in the film because he did seem like a real shitty pretentious director. My second favorite was Ilona Saic. She played Gabby the make-up girl and she did it in the most stereotypical babbling bimbo style you could imagine, but manages to keep it both funny and somehow real.
But sadly I can't put "Le Fear" up there with the greatest mockumentaries, simply because the movie never becomes "a look into a failed film production", it only shows a bit of it. It starts out great with the director trying to get a team together, and up until filming I was having a lot of fun with the movie. The problem is that when they start shooting the movie it moves too slowly and jumps too much between the scenes they are filming. They show maybe 5-6 failed takes on a scene, and then the next scene is a completely new one. I would've loved to have seen a more expanded look into the making, and maybe even some parts from when he was writing the movie. These things are actually hurting the movie more than you would expect them to because it gets really tedious after a while and even though it's short you sometimes wish it was shorter. Jason Croot is apparently working on a sequel, called "Le Fear 2: The Sequel" (I love the originality in that title), and I hope he makes it feel like they're actually making a real feature film and not just snippets of a film. |
