Believers

Believers
Studio: Warner Bros.
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Believers
Daniel Myrick, director of The Blair Witch Project, confounded expectations when he emerged last year with his first post-Blair Witch film. The Strand is a complex, character-rich comedy built around the odd lives of several inhabitants of Venice Beach, Calif. In it, Myrick showed a real sensitivity to creating personalities and making them interact in unusual ways. So how does he follow up that piece of rewarding, stereotype-shedding film work? A straight-to-unrated-video thriller about two paramedics who get abducted by an end-times cult. Myrick has been producing these hack films for the Warner Bros.’ Raw Feed imprint for a while, but this is the first time he’s put himself in the driver’s seat as writer and director, and the results are disappointing. Razor-thin dialogue, a ham-fisted plotline, hollow characters played by sub-porn actors (the presence of evil character actor Daniel Benzali is surprising) and an utter lack of ingenuity make one wonder why – besides the easy paycheck – Myrick would bother with this. He’s proven himself to be a more inventive horror director, and with The Strand he showed that he wasn’t simply limited to making genre films. Even if it is just for the money, Believers feels like an abrogation of talent; though Myrick gets in a few quirky touches (the gas station from which the paramedics disappear is called “Haxan”), the film is as flat and lifeless as the cult members at its center.

This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2007.