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Atrocious (DVD) – Spanish found footage horror isn’t as bad as the title suggests

27th September 2011 By Tim Isaac


Atrocious tells the story of a brother and sister who, along with their parents and younger brother, go to the family’s old rural farm in Sitges, Spain. The siblings run a web show uncovering and reporting urban myths and legends. Whilst at the farm they decide to investigate the story of Melinda, a young girls whose ghost is said to haunt the nearby woods.

As you can tell from this short synopsis, the film is on familiar turf that we have seen many times before. Fernando Barredo Luna decides to do is create the action as found footage, in a similar vain to the now classic Blair Witch Project and the more recent Paranormal Activity, as well as Atrocious’ Spanish counterpart Rec.  All of these films were ambitious and very successful upon, but despite the ‘found footage’ sub-genre of horror only being a relatively small collection of films, it has already created a lot of generic formulas that Atrocious sticks to rigidly.

Our lead characters, Cristian and July, are two aspiring filmmakers themselves, but throughout the film you really do find yourself thinking it’s rather convenient that they have the camera running all the time in order to catch all of the little snippets and storylines that quite frankly are made far too easy for the audience to follow. As a result you end up piecing the ending of the film together a lot sooner than Luna intended.  The set up of Melinda ‘The Girl of Garraf Woods’ seems to have been lifted straight from films such as Ringu or The Grudge  and it’s all too convenient that the maze she occupies is right outside the family farm and they have no idea what it is until a family friend tells them the story (on camera of course). 

As with most horror film the action ramps up at night, starting off quiet slowly with Cristian hearing noises coming from the labyrinth outside and it is not long until  the family dog disappears and this is when things begin to get interesting. Despite the rather formulaic story, Luna does a successful job at building suspense and tension within the film. However it all comes from lots of running around with night vision turned on and long shots of the characters breathing heavily. So much of the film is spent doing just this, so once the violent and bloody climax comes it all happens so quickly we really haven’t got time to adjust. Once we are hit with the final twist it really is a bit of a disappointment and  creates too many unexplainable plot holes, making much of the build up pretty much pointless. It means many viewers wishing will wish they could have fast forwarded to the credits and left it at that.

Overall Verdict: An ambitious low-budget, found footage horror, which it does have a few faults, but director Luna does know how to build suspense and tension even if the payoff is a little cheap.

Special Features:
Making of

Reviewer: Gareth Haworth

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