Movie Review - 'Baghead'

Baghead

Starring Matt Partridge, Steve Zissis, Greta Gurwig, and Elise Miller
Directed by Jay and Mark Duplass
Rated R

Throughout horror movie history, it has never been the movies with the biggest budgets or even the biggest stars that have shaken us to our core. Go back to Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare On Elm Street. Really, the only movie with substantial overhead that re-wrote horror was The Exorcist. All the others were made on the cheap; even Psycho was self-financed by Hitchcock, which is why it was in black and white.

And it has remained that way up through at least The Blair Witch Project, a movie that gets overwhelmingly bad press these days, but in 1999, it was a different story. In fact, I'd wager that if you added the budgets for Psycho, Chainsaw, Nightmare, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Blair Witch, you might have a stack of money worth about, what, three million bucks?

Baghead will not re-write horror, and I don't think that's at all the intention, but it could give the horror genre something to consider instead of remaking old American slasher flicks or recent paranormal movies from Asia. Mark and Jay Duplass have certainly given us something that stands out from the crowd. The low budget is not only unavoidable but is also part of the greater concept.

The brothers' films have been associated with the Mumblecore movement, which is marked by the lack of production values and the dissection of relationships in every movie. The actors usually aren't professionals, or if they are, they don't have a lot of credits. The dialogue might be improvised. Very often, the movies are shot on digital video cameras. Odds are, if you've never heard of Baghead or the Duplass brothers, you've never heard of Mumblecore, either.

This is the first Mumblecore film to attract a major distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, so it could mark a new beginning for the movement, or it could mark the end. If Baghead was as good at the end as it was at the beginning and in the middle, I'd have more hope.

Four actors with flagging careers decide to hole up in a cabin around Big Bear, California to write a script. Ideally, the four actors would star in that movie. When they arrive, strange things start happening, and one of the actors thinks she sees a man walking around in the woods with a paper bag over his head. The Unknown Comic lives!

Because this movement of filmmaking focuses so much on relationships, horror movies are kind of a natural fit. There is one former couple in the cabin, and one prospective couple, which might actually not be the couple one of them thinks it is. But it's hard to determine after about an hour if Baghead wants to be scary or if it wants to be funny or if it wants to put both of those things in the backseat and worry about the problems of four people, which don't amount to a hill of beans in this world.

Baghead is not a frightfest, but there are moments that feel pretty scary, and when it's funny, Baghead is probably at its best.  But if there are ways to put those elements together effectively, Bthe movie kind of misdiagnoses what they are. If you're a fan of low-budget film, or you're an aspiring filmmaker yourself, it's worth watching to see what you can accomplish with very little. But just imagine what they could've accomplished with just a little less.