Review #65: The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

This review was originally written in October 2019.

October Horror Movie Review #13: The Taking of Deborah Logan

Hooray, more found-footage. I'm not really sure what overall thoughts to give other than "it's not as bad as most found-footage" but that isn't really meant as a compliment. I enjoyed most of the movie but it falls victim to so many of the problems other found-footage films do, and lots of standard horror tropes as well. I can't really think of much this film did that hasn't been done many times before.

Let's start with the plot: A documentary crew are doing research on Alzheimer's, so they set up a long-term study on a woman named Deborah Logan, with the crew living in her house and documenting the progression of the disease. As her conditions begin to worsen, supernatural happenings start to occur, and eventually it's discovered that her condition and behavior are tied to this evil ritual attempted by a dying man many years ago.

The characters are nothing special; none of the documentary crew stood out in any way except for (Gavin?) whose only role both in-fiction and out was to antagonize a little old woman with Alzheimer's; everyone else was as blank a slate as you could make them. Once the plot actually got going it was interesting, but looking back after the end of the film most of the spooky happenings (such as when Deborah seemingly teleported up on top of the stove, or when she was found naked operating the broken switchboard) had basically no explanation in-universe and only served as a spooky event to further the plot. Would it have killed them to come up with spooky events that would have actually made sense, given the purpose of the evil plot in the end?

I also need to complain a bit about how this movie made everyone as stupid as possible in order to make the plot happen. If a person was admitted to the hospital with strong self-harming tendencies, even a small town's hospital would station that person with a sitter watching over them 24/7. If the hospital did not do so, and then that person not only escaped her room but also kidnapped a child from the pediatric ward, you can GUARANTEE they would give both the kidnapper AND the child 24/7 supervision while they were still in the hospital (and most likely the administrators would be arrested for neglect and dereliction of duty). But the writers of this movie really liked the idea of this old demented woman kidnapping this child and escaping, so they wrote the hospital staff as being so stupid as to leave both individuals unsupervised to facilitate that. (Not to mention how freaking bizarre it would be entrusting a random documentary crew to travel with the doctors and police in the search for these missing persons; but then we'd have no movie.)

Speaking of which, this is one of the many movies where I have to ask, why did this need to be found-footage? I understand wanting the point of view of someone studying the situation as it happened, but hey, listen up film producers- there's nothing wrong with writing a standard movie about a documentary crew. If you do that, then you don't need to come up with absurd reasons for why this unskilled documentary crew is heading a police investigation, or why they're still filming even when they're shooting a gun at a crazed woman in a cave somewhere.

And another thing about this plot that really bothers me: It falls into the same hole so many other movies do when dealing with the supernatural. Picture this: If I was a real-life person and I wanted to know about, say, demons- I could type "demons" into Google and get about a billion results. I could look up ten different encyclopediae and get ten wildly different entries. I could ask twenty different spiritual leaders and get an array of stories and ideologies. If I was trying to banish or defeat a demon, the number of conflicting methods I could get would be too vast to count.

But if I was in a movie, I would ask one person, and that one person's method would turn out to be the correct one. And that's what this movie does- it proposes a reality where a man was attempting a ritual to become immortal, the only source of information on that ritual is a two-minute segment of one television documentary, and when the protagonists talk to an anthropology professor about how to stop it, he shares one story from one tribe in Africa and that story contains the one correct method how to end the plot of this movie. If this were any other type of movie I could easily brush it off and say, "Eh, whatever, this movie takes place in an alternate reality where yes, there is actually only one story in the entire world about this phenomenon and no conflicting answers exist". But, as I complained about previously this month, this film is shot in a specific medium intended to make us feel like this is taking place in the real world, and if that weren't enough, it also even begins with a blurb about how it's all real footage from an actual case. And yet they also expect you to overlook any detail that takes you out of the illusion because "come on, it's just a movie".

In short, this movie did not need to be found-footage. The characters are all either completely blank slates or are so stupid that they themselves are just as to blame for the horror as the spooky monsters. And the filmmakers wanted to trick you into being scared by using the lowest-effort medium possible, but also don't value your attention enough to follow through on that trick. Yes some of it was well-shot and there were some spooky moments, but the movie was far too low-effort to deserve the acclaim that it has gotten.

Overall rating: 4/10

Where I Know That One Actress From: No clue, but Lisa saw her in A League of Their Own

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Next up: Before I Wake!

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