Weekly visions - week 27, 2026

Area 51, written and directed by Oren Peli, US, 2015 - ⭐½

The other film directed by the creator of Paranormal Activity. Shot in 2010 but released five years later, this is a classic found-footage movie that reminded me a lot of Horror in the High Desert 2, which, in comparison, is a masterpiece.

The plot can be guessed by the title itself, so let’s not waste time on that.
There’s a home invasion section that is difficult to watch because of the sheer stupidity of the characters’ decisions, and that’s still better than the interminable second half in the secret military base.
I have the impression that several scenes are inspired by Quatermass and the Pit, but I won’t go back and check.
Only for completists of Peli’s directorial efforts.

Saw 3D / Saw: The Final Chapter, directed by Kevin Greutert, written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, US, 2010 - ⭐⭐ (up from ⭐½)

Oren Peli didn’t direct Paranormal Activity 2, and neither did Kevin Greutert, who was working on the project before being forcefully pulled back into John Kramer’s unfinished business.

Both titles for this film sound incredibly lazy, but at least one of them prepares us for the endless instances of spikes, needles and pointy things that would have graced our eyes if we went and saw this in a cinema, having learnt nothing from The Final Destination.

This is the one where former young Indiana Jones and Boondock Saint Sean Patrick Flanery gains media visibility by publishing a book called S.U.R.V.I.V.E. (is it an acronym? What does it stand for? Or do the dots only indicate that survival happens one step at a time?), describing the lessons learnt from surviving one of Jigsaw’s traps - although we never saw him in any of the previous films.

It would be an intriguing plot, centring on people who made it through the John Kramer idea of a life-affirming experience, and it gives us the chance to enjoy one more time Tanedra Howard’s Simone, still pissed off about having to cut her own arm in the previous film. She’s probably my favourite character of the saga (sorry, Amanda!).
It also brings back the saga’s oldest character and the oldest setting from the saga, and ties up all the loose ends, as screenwriters Melton and Dunstan finally put an end (although you never know) to the Tales of Hoffman saga.

On the plus side, it’s a bit more narratively streamlined than its predecessors, as the flashback narrative only covers a couple of scenes at the beginning and the end of the film.

But it’s also the film with the nastiest traps so far - and the most fake-looking visual effects -, and it’s pervaded by an incredible amount of misogyny: all female characters suffer fates much worse than their male- counterparts, some of them for no reason at all.

So, despite the reinvigorating last couple of minutes, everybody must have been happy that this was indeed the final chapter for Saw… for a while.

Man Finds Tape, written and directed by Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

Another honest title that makes it clear we are again in found footage/mockumentary territory.
Debuting director duo Gandersman and Hall weave an intriguing story about strange events happening in a small town in Texas.

I won’t spoil where the plot goes, but the two are supported, production-wise, by another, well-established pair of creatives: one scene, specifically, has the same effect as a sign stating ‘Benson and Moorhead were here’.

I was a bit disoriented by the temporal jumps in the story and the different types of camera used having largely different resolutions (for philological reasons, I suppose). But overall, it’s an entertaining and original enough film, populated with faces that looked familiar but that I had not met before.

Lovely, Dark, and Deep, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland, US/Portugal, 2023 - ⭐⭐⭐

Another debut: director Sutherland’s first film features Georgina Campbell as Lennon, a newly appointed ranger of a National Park, full of good intentions but troubled by a past trauma that pushes her to disregard her superiors’ orders to help people.
Her past is also the reason why she sought this job: when she faces the truth behind the frequent disappearances of hikers, she will have to learn the hard way how to overcome her fears and let go.

Rather economical in terms of characters and ‘action’, this film deals with a couple of well-beloved horror subgenres, and overall is able to offer some surprises about where its story is headed.
But, while I can’t really point out what should have been done differently, I was left with the feeling that this could have aspired to be a much more gratifying watch: all the right elements were there, but still something was missing.