The Bay (Barry Levinson, 2012)

The success of the The Blair Witch Project licensed a wave of low budget-encumbered filmmakers to have a stab at features in the 'found footage' style and by now even well-established industry names like Barry Levinson are not above putting out pet projects for tuppence ha'penny, feeling legitimised by the format's popularity. But this popularity has also sent it well past the point of effective freshness by now, especially for horror, such as here. The Bay tries gamely to sucker in a horror audience with the style to sneak an overt eco-message under their radar, with an pollution-spawned outbreak of killer parasites laying waste to a small town on the U.S. east coast and works neither particularly well as horror because of its finger-wagging priorities nor as a serious political sermon due to being compromised by the need to keep topping up the gore quotient.

4/10