When you binge on 31 movies, all of which must be new to you, eventually you’ll hit a found footage horror flick. It looks like this morning was my time.
The Tunnel concerns a news crew descending into the tunnels under Sydney, Australia to discover if government plans to develop a water-recycling program will impact the already at-risk lives of a homeless population living down there. They discover the homeless have a much bigger problem and, when their soundman goes missing and the news team gets lost, so do they.
Horror films are by nature a mixed bag, subject to everything from poor writing to low budgets to fans’ expectations when trying to deliver the scary goods. Throw in the found footage element and you’ve got even higher barriers to overcome. The Tunnel does one of the better jobs at handling the found footage genre, largely because they use a documentary style framing story. We’re watching a professionally produced documentary covering the events of the film, so it’s not 90 minutes of jerky camera work in the dark. There is that, but we do get a dose of pseudo-Werner Herzog to help it all go down smoother.
The premise isn’t a new one: Something is eating folks underneath the city. It could be C.H.U.D., it could be alligators (crocodiles more likely since its Sydney), it could be cannibals, but we don’t know. So how does The Tunnel handle this? That all depends on how much ambiguity you like in your spooky movies. The Tunnel never explains what’s down there and, because we see the events in low light conditions and via night vision, we’re left to guess for ourselves. Did that work for me? Not really. The real world is ambiguous enough so if you’re going to entertain me, I ask for a little effort. Anything would have sufficed, really, but apparently that was too big an ask for The Tunnel.
This isn’t the worst found footage film I’ve ever seen, but it suffers from the usual flaws despite the documentary frame. Shaky cameras, no illumination, people screaming other people’s names in the dark, and, worst of all, continuing the trend begun in The Blair Witch Project of having the only woman in the cast be responsible (or rather, irresponsible) for the mess that ends up with folks being murdered in the dark.
Rating: The documentary frame elevates The Tunnel slightly, earning it 2-and-a-half skulls out of 5. Had they actually gotten Werner Herzog, it would have been a solid 4 out of 5.
