Controversial,critically pilloried, comedy for the young and horror flick for the old.
"Empire" gave this film the dreaded 1 star treatment accompanied by a scathing review which questioned both the intentions of the filmmaker and the point of the movie altogether.
I completely disagree.
Yes the three leads are crass, obnoxious, despicable human beings but I didn't feel this prevented me from enjoying their endeavours and wanting to see how things will pan out. This most definitely is a film you can't take your eyes off.
At 36 I'm definitely not in the demographic that this film is aimed at and house parties like this are most definitely a thing of my past, OK not quite like this, but boy do I wish I was there. The camcorder style actually adds to the feeling of involvement with this feature and makes you feel as though you bare witness first hand to the mayhem that entails.
If you enjoy watching mindless mayhem, drunken adolescents, roof skateboarding, K9 ballooning and midgets in ovens then this is definitely for you.
Producer Todd Phillips who brought us the "Hangover" franchise, has a firm grasp on what the youth of today want to see in the way of humour with healthy profits stateside considering the films meagre 12 Million dollar budget.
Warner Brothers have granted this film an MPEG-4 AVC encoded 1.78:1 framed, 1080p transfer of differing quality on a 50GB Blu-ray disc.
This is a patchwork presentation from various source elements ranging from iPhones, handhelds and Sony Digital-HD F23 cameras and as a result has varying degrees of quality. I do feel this is in-keeping with the filmmakers' intentions and cannot attribute some of the artifacting, haloing and delineation to the transfer itself, I believe its due to the source elements used to capture the footage.
Colour saturation holds up pretty well considering that the majority of the movie is set at night although I did find that on occasion skin tones appear pale. Detail is pretty strong throughout and the soundtrack is awesome and is loud, loUD, LOUD.
All in all a solid transfer which is accurate to the filmmakers' intentions.
It's been a while since "The Blair Witch Project" but with "Cloverfield" and the more recent brilliance of "Chronicle", I really feel that Hollywood is getting to grips with the camcorder "found footage" style of filmmaking and when you consider the profits coupled with the low production costs I can see a slur of these types of movie in the foreseeable future, I just hope the quality stays to this level.
Highly recommended.