Cinematic Releases: Dashcam (2021) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Momentum Pictures

After the COVID-19 outbreak shuttered theaters and film productions temporarily while filmmakers and producers scrambled to come up with ways to press on, filmgoers saw the emergence of more shoestring do-it-yourself lean mean indies flooding the marketplace.  Instead of the big multimillion dollar summer blockbuster, it was the small, meagerly budgeted pictures’ time to shine if not respond directly to the new impositions and protocols generated by the pandemic.  Among the films that took full advantage of the COVID-19 limitations was writer-director Rob Savage’s Zoom webcam horror flick made for Shudder, Host which presented six characters who hold a séance over webchat during lockdown with unintentionally demonic results.
 
As much of a forward step in the homegrown webcam subgenre as it is a commentary on the shifting social paradigms by way of our technological advancements and need to stay connected via social media, the short digital horror flick became such a hit that its creators were bound to turn around and do another one in the same vein.  Well, just a year later, Rob Savage and co-writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd are back with another far more involving spin on the pressures of social media, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and all manner of general chaos and mayhem with the new Blumhouse webcam horror flick Dashcam.

 
Annie Hardy (in reality the frontwoman of the rock band Giant Drag) plays a right-wing YouTuber version of herself replete with a bright red MAGA hat who livestreams from a dashcam in her car doing rap music off of user comments.  Homeless in LA, she books a flight to London where she visits her former bandmate Stretch (Amer Chadha-Patel) now living with his girlfriend Gemma (Jemma Moore).  Almost immediately, Annie proves to be a troublemaker engaging Gemma on politics and COVID-19 before causing even further upheaval to Stretch’s job as a delivery man. 
 
After a night of insufferable obnoxiousness, the grating and borderline sociopathic Annie gets booted out but not before stealing Stretch’s car and embarking on a night of livestreaming.  Her carefree joyride leads her to a random encounter with a restaurant owner who offers Annie lots of money to transport a frail old lady to an undisclosed location.  From here, this Jason Blum produced webcam chiller leaps off of the diving board into bonkersville as everything from the demonic, extraterrestrial, the occult, the superhuman and more gets crammed into this batshit freakout that stops short of being a compendium of everything insane from the V/H/S horror series as one nuclear bomb of digital video terrors.

 
Shot on an iPhone on a tight-knight budget of only $100,000, this effects-heavy dose of madness starts out as a wry commentary on the conservative response to COVID-19 and the irascibility of right-wing YouTubers in general, going for the V/H/S 94 vibes that poked fun at the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.  Initially our main character is so grating and obnoxious our first instinct is to leave the theater or shut the stream off, but if you stick with it you’re in for some wild and steadily bizarre antics ahead in this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink demon scream.
 
This is one of the most mean-spirited webcam horror films yet made and also unsurprisingly one which really tests your tolerance for unlikable protagonists.  Those who couldn’t stand Heather Donahue’s heroine in The Blair Witch Project are in for an even uglier nastier version of that with Annie Hardy’s begging-for-death monster whose only instinct as feces, urine, blood and intestines fly about the screen is to keep livestreaming through it all.  This could be a commentary on the worst fringes of right-wing YouTubers or the addiction to being the center of attention come Hell or high water, but whatever major points the film wants to make take a backseat to the makeup effects team.

 
One of the few times where a main character actually makes another standard horror film difficult to recommend (yes, she’s that awful in this), if you can soldier through the petty obnoxiousness you’ll get some wild thrills and chills from one of the crazier found footage features out there.  The Grand Guignols of found footage horror range between Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and Safe Haven from V/H/S 2 as far as cranking up the transgression and insanity through the lens of cinema verite documentary realism.  Dashcam falls somewhere in the middle of being a provocative original and a peddler of more of the same tactics of having jump scares hit the camera with the volume and bass cranked up in key moments.  Overall a decent thriller if you can stand the main character for its duration. 

--Andrew Kotwicki