Mimesis

In theory, Memesis has a neat concept. A group of party-goers are drugged, kidnapped, and dumped into a scenario where they are in a life-or-death recreation of Night Of The Living Dead. It’s kind of Hostel meets The Strangers meets Scream meets … well … Night Of The Living Dead. There’s a lot that could be done with it. It could be a commentary on the grip movies have over fans, and how things like cosplay and role play can be taken too far. It could be a new way of doing meta horror, with the characters knowing how NOTLD plays out and working against it as their adversaries try to keep them on the rails. It could have the characters who are stuck in the “roles” of NOTLD be nothing like NOTLD, causing deviations from the pattern. It could even just be zombies that have been captured and this some kind of field test for some government agency wanting to use the undead as a weapon. I came up with that off the top of my head, just riffing. And it’s 200% more work than the makes of Mimesis did. This starts, it introduces the main premise/mystery, you get to the big reveal, final battle, the end. Every possible opportunity this movie has to dig deeper, to provoke a thought, to explore a concept, is ignored with prejudice. The movie seems to have contempt for doing anything but being a pointless retread of a movie that they can get away regurgitating because it’s in the public domain. There are so very many movies that take a horror premise — camp slashers, exorcisms, zombies, extraterrestrial invasions — that is so familiar it’s almost unwelcome and then does something new with it to breathe new life into the concept. Movies like No One Will Save You, The Final Girls, Scream, and Cabin In The Woods look at the same old picture from a whole new angle. Mimesis is content to put the same old picture in a new frame. That’s not good enough. If that’s where its sins ended, this might’ve skated through with a ** or even a **1/2. But the sheer ineptitude and terrible style choices made at the filmmaking level are unforgivable. Love early 2000’s flash cuts? How about a standard waist high shot that, for no reason, slowly tilts to a dutch angle, stays there, and then tilts back to horizontal? Do you like your film sped up or slowed down for no reason? All of it. ALL OF IT. It’s a constant barrage of flourish that subtracts from the viewing experience. The editing here was done by a pre-schooler with safety scissors. Audio quality is random; one scene could have everyone mic’ed properly, the next has more echo than yelling in Carlsbad Caverns, and the next the volume is so distant and inaudible you’d think the audio was recorded on a wax cylinder. I know this was super low budget — $500K, which is practically a backyard movie these days — so I can’t hold the makers to the standard of an MCU movie. But I can ding them for not recognizing their ambition exceeded their ability to execute by a wide margin. The technical filmmaking is profoundly broken, and the camera trickery and choppy editing draws attention to the movie’s flaws instead of masking them. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig, but the lipstick is toxic waste. And the pig is a carcass left to rot in the desert.