The Bay (2012) Review

WEEK 5: SOMETHING SMELLS FISHY

The Bay (2012) Review

One of the worst things that can happen to a writer is discovering a concept they thought was so original and so groundbreaking and would make such an awesome story has already been done. About a year-and-a-half ago, I saw a documentary on TV about tiny louse-like creatures called isopods, real-life creatures known to eat the tongues of fish, replace their tongues, and live inside the fish’s mouth, and I thought, wow, what a terrifying creature, what if that happened to humans? I developed ten pages of a script and came up with this elaborate plot, and then I discovered much later (and to much disappointment) that it’s already been made into a movie called The Bay, so of course I had to find it and watch it. While my take on mutant isopods would have been radically different, The Bay is a pretty interesting and chilling eco-horror pic.

The events are depicted in a found footage style, and I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing I was initially thinking: oh no, not another found footage movie. From Cloverfield to the Paranormal Activity series, found footage has become overused to point of being nauseating, but The Bay overcomes many of the tropes and takes a slightly different angle. Instead of being devoid of music, presenting impossible-to-achieve shots, and constantly prompting the audience to ask “Why are you still filming?!”, viewers are presented with a collection of footage from every video source imaginable (camcorders, phones, webcams, dash cams, screen shots, news reels—I think the only thing they didn’t have was drone footage) and the footage is edited to be shown as a film. It gives the movie a nice variety, and makes it more unpredictable.

The events chronicle the fourth of July at a seaside community on Chesapeake Bay, where scientists discover the water is contaminated, and people start breaking out with disgusting boils and rashes and vomiting all over the place.  Local doctors have no idea what to make of the numerous patients showing up with similar but unexplainable symptoms. The story is relayed by an up-and-coming news reporter talking into a web cam, and she basically functions as the movie’s main character, but there are several other characters followed throughout, most notably a young couple with a baby who go out on a boat and don’t discover the epidemic until much later, after many have died. It turns out the water is contaminated with tiny isopods, which are causing people to hemorrhage, lose their tongues, and go insane with pain.

The Bay is a very unique creature feature, and I think because it’s presented as found footage, has been severely overlooked by the horror fan community. It’s very much a body horror film, like something David Cronenberg would do, and the isopods are frighteningly realistic in their portrayal. The first time one of the isopods is seen, it is a truly frightening moment that actually made me jump and caused my skin to crawl. While the movie is slow to start, once the cause of the illness starts getting uncovered, it really starts to pick up. There are some really brutal scenes, and the gore is absolutely convincing, which makes it that much more unnerving. The editing is quick and it’s assembled in a way that makes it feel like a documentary, even more so than something like The Blair Witch Project. However, it’s not quite in that wheelhouse of excellence.

In terms of found footage, it’s not the best, nor is it the worst. The whole idea behind the film is this girl is talking on Skype and reviewing the footage the audience is seeing, and going over what she remembers about the event. While it’s established at the beginning the whole thing was a government cover-up and this is leaked footage that the audience is seeing, I still found it questionable as to how she, or whoever she is working with, got their hands on some of the footage. As I said, the video clips come from all over the place, but it still doesn’t seem totally realistic or consistent. Some of the clips, particularly a recovered video that is allegedly “water damaged”, feel a little too perfectly imperfect, if that makes sense. It was clearly touched up in post-production to make it seem more found-footage-esque, but just feels too altered to be real.

The biggest flaw with this movie is the main character. She exhibits little emotion, makes ridiculous comments, and every time she opened her mouth, it made me wish the audio would cut out. She has one of those fake, bitchy voices, and she actually diffuses the scariness from a couple scenes that start out unsettling and had the potential to be really disturbing, but then it cuts back to her, which is very disappointing. She gets ignored for a long while in the middle of the movie, which wasn’t a bad thing, and there’s more news reportage and interviews with the doctors in place of her Skype chat, which was mostly welcome, except for two other extremely annoying characters: the two researchers who initially discover the parasites in many of the dead fish that keep popping up on the bay’s surface. The guy is filming his partner, who is French, and he’s constantly telling her to speak with less of an accent and explain things better and do this and do that. He’s definitely more annoying than she is, but neither of them comes across as likable. All the other characters, while not standout, are tolerable and believable as victims in a bizarre seaside plague.

Given the concept, The Bay is not the amazingly original and terrifying killer creature flick I hoped it might be, but it’s still effective in making your skin crawl, and is mostly convincing in its attempts to appear to have been a real event. Not all of the characters are easy to get behind, the filmmaking techniques work to varying degrees of success, and I had problems with the ending, but despite these less-than-satisfying aspects, I still recommend checking it out. It’s an entertaining, modern creature feature—I just wish I had conceived of giant killer isopods a little sooner.