Review: Polaroid (2019)

Polaroid (2019)

Rated PG-13 for violence/terror, thematic elements, brief language, some teen drinking, and drug material

Score: 1 out of 5

There are some movies you just know are gonna be bad. I'm not talking the fun kind of bad, the rarified territory of Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension or a Jeff Wadlow flick that goes full HAM on ridiculous crap without ever seeming to let the viewer think that it's in on its own joke. I'm talking the kind that commits the worst sin a movie possibly can short of actually getting people hurt during production: being interminably boring. A purported horror movie where the kills are flat and dull, where the scares lose their bite after the first act once you've seen everything in its meager bag of tricks, where the characters are one-note, phenomenally stupid stock archetypes whose actors are mediocre at best, where the plot is filled with trashy Lifetime movie garbage that's way out of its depth at tackling heavy issues, and where the only things to occasionally liven it up are a few good jump scares early on and a few cool shots of the creepy Nova Scotia landscape where this movie was filmed. It's a movie where I knew exactly what I was getting myself into the moment I saw the trailer and realized that it was a ripoff of an old Goosebumps book, Say Cheese and Die!, right down to the main character sharing her unusual name Bird with a supporting character from that book.

So why did I watch it? Because I was in a masochistic mood, that's why. I figured, I've gone too long this spooky season without watching an obvious dumpster fire, so I threw in an awful PG-13 teen horror flick that I must've picked up at Target for five bucks for whatever reason. It's a movie that was supposed to come out in theaters in 2017, but the Weinstein Company's implosion caused it to sit in limbo for two years before it was dumped direct to video, and honestly, I'm not surprised that nobody was eager to release this. It's not a wholly irredeemable film. I've seen worse PG-13 teen horror movies than this, films that managed to truly piss me off with how rotten they were, and Polaroid did not quite reach those lows. Instead, it just left me feeling nothing. I honestly can't tell you which is worse.

We start the film with an opening scene where Cheryl Blossom from Riverdale gets merked after going out of her way to commit every horror movie sin she possibly can (sexy photos for her boyfriend, check, asking "who's there" upon hearing a strange noise, check, going to investigate, check), a scene that's refreshingly honest about what you're in for. After that, we're introduced to Bird Fitcher, a moody teenage girl raised by a widowed mother struggling to make ends meet. Her main character traits are that she always wears a scarf because of an unexplained scar on her neck, and that she's into photography and works at an antique store, which causes her to come into possession of an old Polaroid SX-70 camera from the 1970s. Initially excited to use it, she's soon disturbed by a number of strange events connected to it, particularly the fact that anybody who gets their photo taken with the camera soon dies. Too bad, then, that she took a group photo of her friends at a costume party the other night.

Occasionally, there's an interesting idea here or there. Photographing somebody else with the camera means that they're bumped to the front of the line on the hit list of the ghost haunting the camera and committing the murders. One character raises the prospect of exploiting this to kick the can down the road and extend his own life, and another character does it to save a friend and distract the ghost. I liked the constantly overcast aesthetics of the film, which exploited its filming location in cold, foggy, snowy small-town Nova Scotia to lend it a grungy, kinda blue-collar small town vibe out of a Stephen King novel. The class picture day scene early on has a very neat shot of a moving yearbook image when Bird gets her photo taken. There's one kill towards the end that's pretty cool in concept alone, even if the PG-13 rating meant that it was far more bloodless than it should've been and ultimately just came off as comical in practice. Director Lars Klevberg adapted this film from a short film of his, and visually, there was a lot to like here. Behind the camera, there was some real talent, and it was a shame to see it go to waste on the rest of this movie.

Because oh, I could list off this movie's sins easily, and come up with a checklist for everything obnoxious about bad teen horror movies. None of the characters were all that interesting, being lucky if they amounted to a one-note stereotype as opposed to just a name and a face for the herd of victims. Bird has some tragedy in her backstory, but it's never built upon, only used as pointless exposition to pad for time and establish that she's not particularly wealthy. (We never find out where that scar on her neck came from, nor does it ever become important to the plot or her character.) She's a completely vanilla final girl, the "cool loser" who's fairly attractive and clearly has friends and yet we're supposed to believe is unpopular, and all of the other characters are just as thinly-sketched, if that, falling into stock archetypes like "the boyfriend", "the mean girl", "the asshole", and so on and so forth. The entire cast's performances ranged from forgettable at best to wooden at worst, though it's not like they really had anything to grab onto outside their inevitable death scenes. Even a veteran character actor like Mitch Pileggi as the sheriff left no impression. The kills are barely worth even discussing, from a repetitive buildup to an overreliance on jump scares to the fact that barely anything is ever shown, and the ghost got way too overexposed too early on to be scary, despite a creepy, emaciated look. This is one where some blood could have really salvaged it and provided some cheap thrills, and yet instead, it feels shockingly tame, like the TV edit of itself.

As for the villain's backstory... wow. I didn't know it was possible for a film that seemingly tried so hard to be tasteful in the subject matter it explores to be so tasteless anyway. The camera's curse is connected to a legacy of sexual assault and vigilante murder surrounding its former owner, and it's told in a manner filled with soapy plot twists that ultimately add nothing to the story except failed attempts to shock the viewer with how awful the bad guys are. A subplot involving the idea that the ghost is out for revenge for horrible crimes committed against her, forever identifying her beloved camera with them and thus corrupting it with her pain and anger while a new, human villain is revealed, is briefly floated and might have made things more interesting. Unfortunately, it's quickly dropped upon the following twist, which not only seemed to strip some depth out of the story by making the ghost into just a generic monster, but also dealt a serious blow to my sympathy for Bird for a certain action she committed with only partial knowledge about what was really going on. It's a film that tries to indulge in lurid, head-spinning plot twists but plays it far too safe for them to be effective, meaning that we get the worst of all possible worlds: subject matter that felt edgy for its own sake and fails to either say anything insightful or even really titillate the viewer.

The Bottom Line

Polaroid? More like a cheap disposable camera. It's a junky movie that has a nice look to it but utterly falls apart everywhere else, from the acting and characters to a mess of a story to boring scares. The best thing I can say about it is that I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, and on that front, at least I got what I paid for. Either look for the old Goosebumps episode on streaming or seek out Klevberg's original short film.