2 out of 5

Directed by: Derek Lee and Clif Prowse

A wildly impressive production on a super low budget – wiki reports it as $318,000! – does not get us past Afflicted’s storytelling limitations, which takes a movie-worthy idea and fails to get it beyond the material of a short.

By 2013, found footage horror movies had obviously had their time in the spotlight, so Afflicted’s use of that approach is not novel in itself; however, there is the combination of this with action sequences – beyond just running-with-the-camera, and while I’m not schooled enough to say what movie can claim “first” on that, I’d guess that Afflicted was early to the game, or at least one of the first to successfully combine it with trickery to make for some wildly convincing first-person acrobatics. There’s really no evidence of that low budget in terms of what’s shown on camera in this movie, and there’s skill with shooting around gore gags and such that underlines that creators / stars Derek Lee and Clif Prowse put in the work to map out their visuals. Furthermore, I can definitely get on board with the main concept, even if the found footage tropes run strong with this one in terms of weak decisions to keep shooting. This is indicative of what’s especially frustrating here – this specific aspect and in the overall story – is that there’s a beat already in the script that would’ve given Lee and Prowse much better character motivations, and the focus is instead given to the stunts and effects work. Similarly, they create another avenue for the plot to explore, and choose to go with the stupider one instead. Both of these choices could circle around to budget, and also that there were thoughts of doing this as a web series – i.e. making it bite-sized – but in both cases, I’m gonna go low and suggest that it just would’ve been harder to write the movie that way, and it was cooler (and more fun) to make this as a proof of concept of the action. Which is ultimately what it comes across as. And it’s effective at that, but doesn’t have much to prove after a few minutes.

Derek and Clif – playing “themselves” in the movie – are young filmmakers, though Clif is the one sticking to the pursuit, while Derek faces a crisis: his parents push him towards a more substantial career; and more immediately, he has a brain condition which puts death as a big ol’ “could happen tomorrow” question mark for him. So the two decide to do an ultimate roadtrip movie, with Derek fulfilling some bucket list-y dream of world travel, Clif filming it, opening up chat to an audience to whom they’ll be posting the clips – a video blog, yay 2013 – and also accepting requests for any wild and crazy things they should do.

If you’re going into this blind, that may be where you think they’ll go: escalating audience requests. It’s not; I’m tempted to say that would’ve been more of a thought had the movie been made a decade later, but no, we’ve had those types of movies ever since filming stuff was a thing, so it’s more an early hint of the streamlining Derek and Clif are doing with the script. Which is not a bad consideration, except when the path to get to where you’re going feels a bit too linear and roadmapped, like this setup is just to get us to point B, and that’s it.

Point B I won’t ruin, but it’s a blessing and curse. It’s a super cool idea to take something that’s generally romanticized a bit and go gritty, but we’re also in incredibly familiar territory due to that “something.” In short, an incident occurs with Derek, and it’s shortly clear exactly what that incident means. I guess for some viewers this will be a point of excitement; for me, it made me more skeptical of what was to come. Still, I approve of the pitch.

The movie then has to justify the “why keep filming?” ask, and there’s a total throwaway moment that shows Clif getting exciting, being a filmmaker, at getting to capture rather ghastly events. Again, not new, but compelling, and gives us some character drama. Instead, we fall back on ye ole “we have to document this” as the motivation for filming, and that gets dumber and dumber as plot events unfold.

As apparent real life friends, Derek and Clif do put believable life into their roles, and some of the minutiae of the dialogue has the tang of truth earned from that as well. In the found footage genre, there are enough unique elements here to make the movie a worthwhile distraction, but I would set your sights only on what’s accomplished in the first 30 minutes or so, and accept the rest as an extended cut of that. And so despite watchability, that ratio, for an 85-minute movie, doesn’t really meet the bar of qualifying it as good.