I'm an idiot. My initial introduction for this was going to be "Hey, Netflix should have a 'found footage' tag, because I didn't really feel like watching one when I chose Invoked." But the description all but tells you: "Hey jerk! This is quite obviously a found footage movie!" ("Five friends boozing it up on a deserted island go missing. But their camcorder tells the terrifying tale of a seance gone seriously wrong.") So yeah - I need to read that shit a little more carefully.
But after having a hard time with Green Room, I was hoping for something stupid that would go down easy. And Invoked sounded like pretty straightforward Cabin in the Woods fare. But the first scene of the film is some cops literally finding footage. So the the filmmakers are taking the found footage concept quite literally, I guess.
And then the footage plays... and holy shit is it rough. For 15-20 minutes it flirts with being unwatchable. The characters are just yelling over each other, and all of their dialogue is obnoxious. (And almost certainly improvised - if someone actually wrote this stuff... yikes.) But it also has the sort of camera work that makes you nauseous. I like to think I have a good stomach for this sort of thing, but the shaky cam in Invoked was just too much. I was debating calling an audible and switching to another movie (which I don't like to do), but I stepped away for a few minutes, washed some dishes, and came back. And luckily, once our friends get to their destination the camera work settles down some. The people the camera are filming are still annoying, but at least you don't have to deal with motion sickness on top of it.
My Synopsis: Group of (college-age?) friends go to a boarding house on an island out in the middle of nowhere - and they have it all to themselves. (Apparently one of the character's uncles is trying to flip it or something.) One of the dudes casually drops the information that there's a huge graveyard nearby - filled with the dregs of society people didn't want buried on the mainland - and also someone snapped and murdered their entire family in this very house. And then, they decide to play Ouija board. Or at least a faux version with an empty class and some notebook pages. And I bet you can guess what happens, given Invoked and all. Oh yeah, and they're all Irish. I like that accent...
Elaborate Genre: Found Footage Haunted House
Overall: Some of the found footage scares are actually kind of okay, but pretty much everything else is hard to get through.
It's hard to know how much credit to give Invoked. There are a few times (maybe totaling 7-10 minutes) where the film works - it's tense and is everything you want out of a horror movie. But those times work exclusively on the merits of it's found footageness. Generally speaking, good found footage just works for me - I dig the long, silent takes and the eventual release that comes with the jump scares. But those times when Invoked works, it's pretty generically sticking to the conventions of the "genre." So ultimately it feels like they just lucked out with a good location and a camera with a good, creepy look and texture. There is absolutely nothing here that will win over non-found footage fans.
And even as a fan of found footage, there are times where Invoked just plain sucks. I need to reiterate just how grating the characters are, and how often they are just yelling over each other. I know a lot of the times these things are unscripted to "add to the realism," but if the best your cast can come up with is juvenile piss jokes, maybe you should write some stuff down for them. And one guy wastes a bunch of pot - inhale dude! So as far as the characters go: the good? Their accents. The bad? most everything else. I guess one guy takes a pretty good spill down the stairs, so props for that.
As found footage goes, Invoked sticks to the premise pretty well. They need to run the cameras for lights, because the power is out in the building. Although one camera that they (accidentally?) only show in mirrors looks way too huge and nice for these schlubs to be hauling around. But there's no music in the film, and only one significant camera cheat that I caught. And yes, someone does in fact get dragged away from the camera by an unseen force. Although it's interesting how the film commits hard to the premise (literally having people Find the Footage) for the entire film, only to have it cut to super-stylized credits with metal music once it's said and done. Usually these sorts of things just fade to black, but I guess the filmmakers were proud of themselves. And they should be - a lot of the ghost stuff works.
But when the ghost stuff doesn't work (maybe a third of the time?), it's pretty bad. The CGI is a little too blatant and looks poor. The filmmakers do a decent job of hiding the bad stuff. I think you only ever see the ghosts/spirits/whatevers through the crappy, black and white camera. Lower resolution = easier and cheaper, I would guess. And a lot of the scares are just "shapes in the corner" or "darting in and out of frame" sort of thing. But even considering the ones that don't work - the scares are the highlight of Invoked, and it's not even close.
So yeah, while the spooky elements of Invoked work, they are nothing you haven't seen before if you are a fan of found footage films. And you aren't a fan of these types of films, stay far, far away.
I would not recommend this film.
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