Let’s sit around.
Char Man is another micro-budget horror film released on Amazon Prime. We follow three friends who are making a fake documentary about an urban legend but discover another urban legend along the way.
Almost the entire (or perhaps the entire) film is shot on handheld, and this automatically places the film into the category of The Blair Witch Project. Found footage horror is its own genre and I think micro-budget documentary-horror-found-footage should probably be considered one as well. These films aren’t necessarily bad by inception, but we all know more or less how it is going to go.
There is a tension in this film between obvious budgetary constraints and the need to meet our arbitrary running time. At about 90 minutes this film could probably have cropped nearly half of the running time. We get a lot of set-up about finding the Ojai Vampire (which they know is fake) and multiple empty scenes of discussing how to frame the scenarios they will be filming.
To be blunt, how good do you expect this film to be? This (like many others) suffers from people faking 10/10 reviews on IMDB and Amazon to give it a falsely inflated score. Doing a fake review does the film no favors—so whoever does this should simply stop. I’m not even trying to be a prick here, but the odds of a Blair Witch copy (essentially) truly being an amazing cinematic experience are relatively slim. The characters are likable enough, but the film simply doesn’t have enough meat on the bones to be considered worth viewing by anyone outside of genre junkies.
Setting up a horror film where a main thread is that horror documentaries are completely manufactured could be interesting. However, we just don’t have the tension here to maintain interest. Worth skipping.
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