Review #64: The Emerging Past Director's Cut (2017)

This review was originally written in October 2019.

October Horror Movie Review #12: The Emerging Past Director's Cut

So, the only reason I know about this movie is because one of the listeners of my podcast knows someone who was involved in making it; that makes me feel like there is a non-zero chance of what I say somehow getting back to that person and I don't really plan on saying anything particularly good about this one. Apparently it won some film awards but I'll get this right out there: I really didn't like this movie. A lot of it might be personal gripes, but you can decide for yourself. (And there is a big twist- question mark? - that I do plan on spoiling. I'll try to save it until the end.)

I think it's a little goofy that this film is titled (everywhere I could find anything about it) "The Emerging Past Director's Cut". There is a different movie called The Emerging Past that has nothing to do with this one; as far as I can find there is no non-Director's Cut version, or at least the internet has no info about it. Whatever the case, it's on Amazon Prime Video under that name, which is how I watched it.

Back when my wife and I were first dating, we would go to the video rental store and pick up a handful of whatever cheapest, schlockiest-looking horror movies we could find so that we could put them on and laugh at how bad they were. (We found a lot of gems that way, but a lot of stinkers too.) This movie feels like the exact type of movie we would rent, watch, and forget about. It looks and sounds extremely cheaply-made- it's shot on low-quality video, it's not particularly well lit or mic'ed, the costumes look like whatever the actors had in their closets and all of the locations just look like a crew member's house or a public park. The dialogue is extremely poorly-written, and the acting isn't much better. In many ways this feels like someone's high school video class project, except made by adults.

But the dialogue isn't the only thing that's poorly-written; the story in this movie is just awful. It took me about half of the movie- a good forty-five minutes- before I could even tell you what this movie was about, and the inciting incident makes no sense. It's about this woman whose husband died- normally I wouldn't put that so immediately in her character description, but they spend like a third of the movie establishing who her husband was and how he died abruptly on their wedding day as if it's crucial to the plot (it isn't)- and one day while taking photos for her job as a journalist (?) she witnesses a brutal murder, and after that it seems like everyone is out to get her and she doesn't know what's real and what isn't.

First off, this "brutal murder" has such a bizarre place in the story I don't even know what to say about it. The entire event has a dreamlike quality to it (it happens in broad daylight but nobody seems to acknowledge it, the perpetrators just sort of appear out of nowhere in makeup and with a dancing woman- it's incredibly disjointed and the last thing I want is for someone to tell me that's intentional) and then, after she escapes with her life and some more bizarre things happen, she wakes up from a nightmare- which, to me, seems to imply that the entire thing was just a dream. However, she then spends the bulk of the rest of the movie freaking out about this murder and hiding the roll of film, despite the fact that it happened in a dream. There's even a point where she (paranoid that "they" are trying to find and kill her to get the film) tells a friend about it in confidence, but it turns out he's wearing a wire, so she kills him- only to wake up again, yet she still continues to act like both killings actually happened.

(Now I'm going to get into spoilers, but I don't recommend watching this film so I'm not concerned.)

Then she finds out she's an escaped mental patient suffering from delusions, so I guess.... you could say that none of that stuff happened? But even within the delusion the character acts delusional. Like I said, she straight-up wakes up from a dream and then spends the next half hour freaking out about the event that happened in her dream. I already hate the "it was all a dream" trope (I ranted about that yesterday) but it's especially perplexing when I never assumed it WASN'T a dream.

What did the director expect the audience to think? Was I supposed to be worried about her and her photos when I knew the photos were taken in a dream? And while we're asking questions of the Strawdirector, hey director, did we need to see that opening scene twice? And did you need to play the "Maybe a fallen angel" dialogue scene three separate times in this film?

The Emerging Past Director's Cut feels like it started with a good idea but then somewhere it got bloated and more bloated and nobody bothered to say, "Hey director, this story doesn't make any sense now" so it just kept going. It looks bad, it sounds bad, and it feels bad, and even the title feels like something went wrong and never got fixed.

Overall rating: 2/10

Favorite actor cameo: Steve Dash, who played Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part 2, played "Det Vorhees [sic]"

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Next up: The Taking of Deborah Logan!