This is enhanced by actual surveillance camera computer screens with green time stamps, zooming in, employing night vision, etc. The camera work is skillful, with creative use of fixed positions to suggest that what we see is only that which the web cameras see. The film looks and flows like any good movie. My Little Eye isn't one of those pieces which is presented on surveillance cam as a cheap gimmick. There's something sinister about these cameras which seem almost to stalk the inhabitants, capturing their most intimate moments in both light and dark, even in the bathrooms. In the meantime, the voyeuristic camera angles make us feel complicit. Who is watching this reality show? If we knew, we might be able to discern answers. What could go wrong with that idea? We're about to find out as a cloud of suspicion and paranoia descends upon the group like a Baby Ruth candy bar sinking to the bottom of a punch bowl. The weekly supply drop-off consists of booze and a loaded handgun. A saferoom which is supposed to be camera-free turns out to be fully wired for sight and sound. Then the heat goes out and the food deliveries cease.
The contestants are now jaded, bored, and planning how to spend the money. The film's effective, brief intro bypasses corny exposition, and after the first three minutes, the film picks up the story a couple of weeks from the show's conclusion. The later proposition might indeed be correct, or at least, that's what we start to wonder. (Turning down lights, holding flashlight under chin.) What are the odds that the producers are up to something? If anyone gives up and leaves, nobody collects. The contest? Spend 6 months together isolated in a country manor for 1 million dollars. They're the ditsy, Generation X types you expect. The players are credible at least and not too unlikable.
In My Little Eye, the obligatory five stereotypical characters enter a contest. As in similar films which begin with the same basic premise - a group of people brought together by an outside entity for an unknown purpose -Cube (1998), Saw (2004), The Killing Room (2009), Exam (2010), Open Grave (2014 -reviewed last month) -tension builds as ensuing plot points suggest and then eliminate numerous macabre possibilities.
The appeal to My Little Eye is in our trying to guess a step ahead of the action. It does however, make for a pretty good horror movie. It doesn't depict a reality with which they're comfortable. Viewer feedback indicates that Big Brother fans don't like this film. My Little Eye was shot way back in 2002, but it never made it to US screens. In My Little Eye however, the house is a decrepit, Gothic country estate, and it's really way the hell out in the snow-bound middle of nowhere.
PLOT: Five contestants live on a reality webcast in a remote mansion, but when everything starts to go horribly wrong, is it by accident or design?ĬOMMENTS: Wait! I know what you're thinking! This movie is actually quite good! It's not a stupid teen slasher or a reality show! OK, actually it's about a reality show -like the TV game show, Big Brother, in which contestants are confined to a specially designed house, cut off from the outside world as in Bio-Dome. WRITTEN BY: David Hilton and James WatkinsįEATURING: Sean Cw Johnson, Kris Lemche, Stephen O'Reilly, Laura Regan, Jennifer Sky, Bradley Cooper, Nick Mennell