AFF: 'Re-Cut'

Are you the sort of person who, when given a choice between spending a leisurely weekend in the countryside or staying put in the concrete jungle and getting your party on, opts for the urban every time? Wise choice, city mouse. You never can tell what those country folk get up to out there, in the cornfields, in the basement, in the barn.

Fritz Manger's Re-Cut artfully reconfigures the hoary old tropes of the well-travelled and dare we say clichéd "city dwellers versus creepy-ass backwoods-types" cinematic sub-genre and ends up being one of the better examples of the form. Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are pretty much inevitable if your narrative is made up of allegedly "real" footage, as is the case with Re-Cut, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's easy now to forget just how disturbing Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's 1999 shocker really was when it hijacked theaters in 1999.

That found footage horror formula goes back at least to Ruggero Deodato's groundbreaking atrocity exhibition Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and has been cropping up all over the place lately (the Paranormal Activity series, The Last Exorcism), thanks in equal measure to the relatively inexpensive cost required to mount such productions and the current, reality-obsessed cultural zeitgeist.

Director Fritz Manger, working from a solid script co-written with Dylan Manger, sets the tone (unrepentantly grim) early on with images of spooky twin girls in flowing white dresses. (Where would genre cinema be without them?) But that's just a tease, really; this isn't Maria Bava nor is it the Overlook Hotel. This is the pasty white underbelly of Americana gothic, made all the more creepy by occasional insert shots and sequences of charnel house horror.

Former Batchlorette Meredith Phillips plays a fictionalized version of herself, a television reporter/media personality who uncovers a possible scoop in the mysterious murder to the aforementioned twins in the deeply weird rural township of Ledville, Wiconsin.

Filming her for a documentary (cannily dubbed "Life After Reality") and therefore along for the ride are two young filmmakers, Adam (Ross Kohn) and David (Austin Basis), who initially seem more game for adventure (of a sort) than Phillips. That all changes when the trio's sojourn to Ledville begins to uncover disconcerting clues about the twins deaths while simultaneously attracting the unwanted attentions of the town sheriff (Tim De Zarn) and a pair of possibly (probably) unsettled locals (Chistopher Redman, Richard Trapp) who wouldn't have looked out of place in Deliverance. Horror ensues.

Re-Cut has something of a fourth main character in the Wisconsin wilderness itself (eerily shot, despite the narrative necessity of using cinema verité-style footage, by Director of Photography Adam Silver), a moribund landscape of drooping yellowish cornfields, sagging old barns, and endless dreariness. Clearly, this is a place where bad things are done in the dark behind locked doors and shuttered windows, but by using Phillips and her documentarians as a proxy for the "real," Manger smartly skews audience expectations until the very end. And by then, of course, it's far too late for all involved.

Re-Cut screens Friday, Oct. 22, 11pm at the Alamo Ritz and Sunday, Oct. 24, 7pm at the Alamo Lake Creek.