Exists (2014)

Exists is the latest horror film from director Eduardo Sanchez (the Blair Witch Project, Lovely Molly, Altered) and is, of course, shot in the found footage style. This is a horror movie about a group of friends who travel to a remote cabin in the woods to spend the weekend partying and quickly find themselves being stalked by... Bigfoot. Yes, this is another found footage horror movie about Bigfoot (I recently reviewed the film Willow Creek that covers similar territory). Willow Creek was a very minimalistic, less-is-more approach to the horror genre that had ups and downs but ultimately was able to create a tense atmosphere and develop interesting characters. So how does Exists measure up? Well to put it simply: Exists takes the exactly opposite approach to the subject and goes way out of its way to show the viewer just about everything to highly mixed, mostly negative, results.

The biggest problems I have with this movie are the characters and writing. I wasn't fond of any of the characters and they are mostly there as cliches set up to be fodder for the beast that is following them. They smoke pot, drink, talk smack and of course hit on each other. Sound familiar? It should, because that covers the characters in about 90% of horror movies. In that respect, Exists is an extremely basic horror movie that doesn't try to create any connection with the audience but instead bombards us with scary scenes and some jump scares. None of the actors are particularly good either, and one scene near the end had me rolling my eyes with how macho and ridiculous one of them male characters was trying to be. Luckily, there are some elements to the story itself that made Exists worth watching to the end.

As I previously mentioned, Exists is not a subtle movie. While there are scenes near the beginning that rely on sound and quick glimpses of the horror in the woods to build tension, Exists quickly jumps into full on mayhem and doesn't shy away from showing Bigfoot at all. Some of the scenes at night where the characters are trying to quietly navigate in the woods are very tense and some of the more explicit, in-your-face horror moments were genuinely surprising and took me off guard. None of the visuals in Exists are particularly striking or unique, but Bigfoot itself is quite menacing in some scenes and really does come out of nowhere in very surprising ways. The story itself isn't very complicated and basically has the group of friends struggling to figure out how to get out of the woods to safety. Nothing about the story was unpredictable but it served the purpose of going from scary moment to scary moment well enough. Also, the movie is short (less than 90 minutes).

In terms of horror, Exists does have quite to bit to offer in quantity, but it's a pretty mixed bag that is muddled by completely forgettable characters and cliches. Again, this is a found footage horror film so if you already hate what the genre has to offer this is not going to do anything for you. And as far as the found footage element goes, it wasn't utilized particularly well here. Most of Exists would have been just as effective if it were shot like a normal film (outside a few of the night vision sequences). Overall, Exists is about as cliché as it gets for horror movies. Bigfoot itself is pretty cool and some of the scary scenes were surprising, but overall there wasn't a whole lot going on that makes me want to recommend this to anybody except die hard horror fans. It's a shame too, since director Eduardo Sanchez has made nothing but movies I have really enjoyed so far. After the revolutionary popularity of the Blair Witch Project it's a shame to see such forgettable material from the director.

4.5/10