There will be blood — and excitement
Derek and Clif’s monstrous adventure delivers
Afflicted ½ Starring: Derek Lee, Clif
Prowse Directed by: Clif Prowse &
Derek Lee Running time: 85 minutes
In the found-footage horror film Afflicted, two buddies — Canadian filmmakers Derek Lee and Clif Prowse, playing characters named Derek Lee and Clif Prowse — head off for a yearlong, around-theworld adventure. Derek has a brain abnormality called arteriovenous malformation, so the trip may be a last chance for him. Clif is a filmmaker who will document the holiday, to be called Ends of the Earth. They’ll scale mountains and meet women and eat live crickets in Cambodia, if someone wants them to.
Well, long story short, Derek meets a woman in Paris, she bites him on the arm, and he turns into a mon- ster. By the time they get to Vernazza, Italy — which, by the way, looks like paradise on the Mediterranean, especially in Clif ’s time-lapse videos of the sun encroaching on the pastel houses at the edge of the blue sea — the only thing they’re really interested in is finding something suitable for him to eat.
Afflicted is, then, kind of an old (not to say eternal) story, but dressed up in new media and new attitudes: at one point, once they’ve figured out why Derek is so hungry all the time and why he looks so strangely pale, Clif goes onto the Internet to check up on what to expect. Derek will shortly develop power over vermin, it says, although — like a lot of stuff you read online — this turns out not to be true.
There’s also a nice moment when Derek slams his fist into a stone wall, demolishing it, and Clif, who’s been frantic about what’s happening to his friend, realizes that he’s in the presence of something not only supernatural but, like, awesome. All fears are put aside as Clif films Derek’s new superheroic abilities: smashing rocks, leaping into the air, lifting a van, and outrunning a motorcycle.
“Holy crap,” says Clif, before we return to our regularly scheduled horror movie.
There’s actually not much horror involved, although there is quite a bit of blood. Afflicted doesn’t develop its themes — Derek’s brain condition, for instance, turns out to be an excuse to ignore the first signs of abnormality — as much as it exploits its visual tropes. “Found footage” has become a tired technique (one waits in vain for the “lost footage” genre), but Lee and Prowse, who also wrote the screenplay, give it new life: when Clif builds a strap-on camera to capture all of the details of the trip, he creates a plausible explanation for the creature-eye-view of the chases through darkened streets, and also infuses a secondary plot — Derek is being pursued by police for his habit of occasionally feasting on locals — with a kinetic excitement. The shaky-camera lens, flecked with blood, becomes a telling symbol of Derek’s desperation. It also helps darken the low-budget effects, giving them a greater reality.
Just as it begins to lose steam, it circles back to Paris, an ideal city for this kind of shadowy imagining, for a conclusion that hints at blacker, more psychological thrills to come.