Review of Sx_Tape (2013) by Mary M W — 18 May 2014

What SX_Tape does well, it does well enough to leave an impression. The claustrophobic feeling of the hospital make the character's mental states easy to believe. The jump scares are also well-executed.

Unfortunately, everything else fails to excite. The first 1/3 of the movie is random slice-of-life type scenes, regularly interrupted for the main character, Jill (Caitlyn Folley), and her boyfriend to have sex. It's rather wearying by itself, and made moreso with the unsexiness of the visual aesthetic of found footage-genre movies.

You'd think that once the scares started happening that the sex would cease. It doesn't. It decreases, yes, (preferring to have endless shots of Jill rushing hurriedly through samey hallways) but two of the main sex scenes of the movie are found within the confines of this abandoned hospital.

The first one, if it was the only sex scene of the movie, could be defensible. In fact, it might even enhance the overarching story. That it follows one of the main scares of the movie isn't inconsequential. It's the absurd sex scene that serves as the climax (narratively speaking) that pushes this movie into ROFL territory. Watching the absurdly porn-inspired exaggerated humping and position-switching cheapened the entire movie.

There is the core of an interesting story here. The director has shown that he can deliver about a half-hour of an interesting horror movie. Then to puff it into a full-length he added a lot of sex and nonsense. Strip out that sex and nonsense and build the core narrative and *presto!*; a good movie. Unfortunately, that is not what we have.