When all the yelling and arm waving is over and the dust has cleared, BODY AT BRIGHTON PARK is a very simple movie. A very young and inexperienced girl, who is little more than a tourist greeter at a state park, gets herself lost and in over her head out in the wilds of the park. Though the weather is rather mild and the scale of hardship she faces is minimal, her behavior borders on the criminally incompetent relative to the mild challenges she faces.
Out in the dark woods, alone except for the dead body she has stumbled across and is now tasked to watch over until more competent people arrive in the morning, she spends most of the night hallucinating frightening experiences. If she's not imagining the cadaver rising up as a zombie then she's squirting herself in the face with bear repellent.
Derp.
Towards the end of the movie we viewers have been so repeatedly sucked into her imagination-driven hallucinations that turn out to be nothing that when a REAL threat shows up, a large bear who wonders what a girly forest ranger might taste like, it takes us a while before we even believe that it's an actual threat THIS time.
At the very end of the picture, when the, ahem, "adults" have finally arrived to everybody's relief, including us viewers, we're given the "twist" that the random hiker she met a few times the previous evening and earlier that morning was actually the ghost of the dead man she'd been watching over all night. Ooo... Scary.
Given the fact that the meat of the movie is this girl's incompetence and runaway imagination, there isn't much to recommend the plot. The primary character is made so incompetent, an intentional character decision, that she becomes irritating. The repeated incarnations of every scary situation turning out to be "only a dream" gets boring.
Stylistically, while the scenery is beautiful, the movie is carried off with amateurish detail work. The beginning and ending credits look like a flashback nightmare out of the 70s. The spray coming out of the bear repellent can looks like somebody watched a 3 minute tutorial from YouTube on Adobe After Effects and then did a bad job of it. And so on.
While it's definitely not the worst movie you'll ever see, if you insist on watching it you should probably have some vacuuming or dishes or something productive to do at the same time so you don't come away feeling you've COMPLETELY wasted your time.
Out in the dark woods, alone except for the dead body she has stumbled across and is now tasked to watch over until more competent people arrive in the morning, she spends most of the night hallucinating frightening experiences. If she's not imagining the cadaver rising up as a zombie then she's squirting herself in the face with bear repellent.
Derp.
Towards the end of the movie we viewers have been so repeatedly sucked into her imagination-driven hallucinations that turn out to be nothing that when a REAL threat shows up, a large bear who wonders what a girly forest ranger might taste like, it takes us a while before we even believe that it's an actual threat THIS time.
At the very end of the picture, when the, ahem, "adults" have finally arrived to everybody's relief, including us viewers, we're given the "twist" that the random hiker she met a few times the previous evening and earlier that morning was actually the ghost of the dead man she'd been watching over all night. Ooo... Scary.
Given the fact that the meat of the movie is this girl's incompetence and runaway imagination, there isn't much to recommend the plot. The primary character is made so incompetent, an intentional character decision, that she becomes irritating. The repeated incarnations of every scary situation turning out to be "only a dream" gets boring.
Stylistically, while the scenery is beautiful, the movie is carried off with amateurish detail work. The beginning and ending credits look like a flashback nightmare out of the 70s. The spray coming out of the bear repellent can looks like somebody watched a 3 minute tutorial from YouTube on Adobe After Effects and then did a bad job of it. And so on.
While it's definitely not the worst movie you'll ever see, if you insist on watching it you should probably have some vacuuming or dishes or something productive to do at the same time so you don't come away feeling you've COMPLETELY wasted your time.