BECKONING THE BUTCHER

Everybody else is trying their hand at "found footage" horror movies these days ... so why not the Australians too?

This low budget offering (reportedly made for just 3,00 Australian dollars) starts off familiarly enough, onscreen text advising that "the producers would like to thank the families of those who went missing"...

Then we meet Chris (Damien E Lipp), a young man renowned in his time for filming his attempts at dispelling myths surrounding rituals designed to summon demons. With his trusty camcorder, he became a hit online with his spooky videos detailing his efforts to raise evil.

When his latest experiment fails to produce any results, Chris shrugs it off and proudly announces that his next venture will be based around a local legend entitled "Beckoning the Butcher". The idea is to take several friends with him to a place in the country where they aim to entice a paranormal entity into this world.

"Hopefully we'll get some really good scares with this one", Chris unwittingly smiles to the camera.

Without further ado Chris is on the road and picking up a bunch of chums en route to his pal Brent's (Tristan Barr) remote holiday house - the perfect place to carry out their ritual, we're told. Also along for the ride are Tara (Stephanie Mauro), Nicole (Sophie Wright) and Lorraine (Tilly Legge).

As this quintet visit the nearest store for provisions and then go about settling into the holiday home, it quickly becomes apparent that none of them believe in the Butcher: they're all just there essentially to lark around for a couple of nights.

Eventually, after an evening of joviality, the group convene in one room to begin their ritual. They stand around a candle burning from the floor and chant a Latin incantation ten times - giggling and dancing mockingly while doing so.

Their fun over, the five of them then retire to another room where they sit around the same candle - in the dark - and joke about whether their ritual has been successful.

They don't have to wonder for long...

The film is, perhaps unwisely, interspersed with present-day interviews with folk reflecting back on the fate of Chris and his pals. Detective Marcus (Peter Flaherty), Chris' brother David (Lliam Murphy) and psychic Shannon (Janet Watson Kruse) all speak in earnest about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the found footage, and unfortunately ruin the momentum whenever they appear on screen. The sombre expressions from Kruse and Murphy in particular are little short of laughable.

Those gripes aside though, along with the usual clichéd 'found footage' motifs - shaky handheld cameras; lots of 'headless chicken' panic in the latter scenes; false alarms earlier into proceedings; the kids discovering that (a) their mobile telephones have no network coverage and (b) their car won't start - BECKONING THE BUTCHER actually isn't all that bad.

It benefits from good performances from the five kids, and a genuine sense of chemistry between them in the more laidback early scenes. Also, when it gets spooky, director Dale Trott does manage to elicit a fair degree of creepiness.

Special effects are used sparingly, working with the gradual build-up towards the film's escalation of terror. It works well, especially within the confines of a slim 69-minute running time.

Don't get me wrong, BECKONING THE BUTCHER isn't great and certainly doesn't provide anything you haven't seen many, many times before. But it's one of the more proficient 'found footage' knock-offs in recent memory. The POV shots creeping stealthily into empty darkened rooms are effective, as are the incessant screams nearer the film's end.

Monster Pictures bring BECKONING THE BUTCHER to UK DVD uncut.

It looks good here, in 16x9 widescreen. The camcorder footage is understandably grainy during the night scenes but generally speaking the film offers warm colour schemes, sharp images and natural flesh tones. The interviews with David etc appear to have been shot in HD.

English 2.0 audio is a solid proposition throughout.

A static main menu page leads to an animated scene selection menu allowing access to the film via 8 chapters.

Extras begin with an audio commentary track from Trott, Legge, Lipp, Mauro, Barr and Wright. Trott leads the discussion in the main but all participants chip in regularly. Subjects of conversation range from actresses not realising rituals in the film were fake, to the multiple takes required for some scenes, the locations used, how the cast were freaked during some of the night shoots, the less-than-stellar cuisine they enjoyed during filming and so on. It's a light, chat-orientated track but at least remains uncluttered and listenable throughout.

We get three "deleted scenes", although two of these are actually alternative death scenes to the ones that made the final cut.

The film's original trailer clocks in at 104 seconds and does a fair job of reflecting what you're in for.

There's also a selection of trailers for other titles available from Monster Pictures: APOCALYPTIC, ACROSS THE RIVER, CHOCOLATE STRAWBERRY VANILLA, THE SEARCH FOR WENG WENG, DEVIL'S TOWER, MEMORY LANE and MURDER DROME. If you miss these in the extras menu, the disc is also defaulted to open with trailers for APOCALYPTIC and ACROSS THE RIVER.

As hackneyed as it undoubtedly is, BECKONING THE BUTCHER remains quite an efficient addition to the ever-swelling 'found footage' horror cycle.

By Stuart Willis