Main cast: Sean Cw Johnson (Matt), Jennifer Sky (Charlie), Kris Lemche (Rex), Stephen O’Reilly (Danny), Laura Regan (Emma), and Bradley Cooper (Travis Patterson)
Director: Mark Evans
My Little Eye has an interesting premise: imagine a Big Brother house where the house guests can and will actually kill each other. Filmed using a handheld-camcorder so that viewers will feel as if they are watching the live feeds instead of a “real” movie, this one goes the extra mile in its gimmicky hook. Unfortunately, the movie is also illogical, the characters are banal, and the plot twist is actually very predictable once the clues leading to it are dropped in the movie.
Five people responded to a website that requested them to stay in a remote cabin for six months. It’s an experiment to see whether they can live together and not break the imposed curfew for that period of time. If they succeed, each one will get a million dollars each. If any one of them leaves the cabin though, none of them will get even a cent. The movie tells of what happens in the sixth month of the experiment.
The characters are pretty nondescript and flat, generally fitting typical horror movie archetypes (the slut, the good girl, the weirdo, the jock, and the sensitive guy) and as a result, it is hard to care about them. The first fifty minutes of this movie is an excruciating bore as it is basically flat characters mouthing banal dialogues. These people have secrets, but as they are cardboard characters, I am hard-pressed to care. I find myself counting the minutes and wondering whether I should sneak into the next theater and see whatever they are showing there.
The movie perks up considerably in the last forty minutes when the contestants discover that strange things are happening. Assuming that the people behind the scenes are trying to scare them into forfeiting the prize money, they stay put – until people start dying one by one. However, the ending is a double whammy as it contradicts itself as well as opens another can of worms when it comes to loose ends. The ending leaves me wondering just what the heck the villain is supposed to be doing in the movie. Is this person a mole or someone who decides to win the approval of Big Brother in order to be recruited? Why does this person wait for six months to do anything if this fellow is the mole?
One can argue that a movie where five people sign up for a stupid experiment without knowing anything else about it cannot be held accountable for its subsequently illogical plot twists and turns. But I still say that if My Little Eye is better written, it would be have been a better movie. As it is, it’s just a gimmick and a perplexing one at that.
