Dashcam (2021)

 

**This post contains spoilers**

The Story- During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a popular live streamer named Annie (Annie Hardy) visits London to reconnect with her friend and old band mate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). Stretch’s girlfriend, Gemma (Jemma Moore) quickly grows tired of Annie’s abrasive personality, so Annie steals Stretch’s car to go off on her own.

Annie hijacks Stretch’s job as a food delivery driver to pick up an order at a restaurant, and the owner of the restaurant offers to pay Annie for an odd side job. She wants Annie to drive her elderly friend Angela (Angela Enahoro) to a location, and she’s willing to pay more for Annie to do the job. Annie agrees, but Annie quickly finds out that she unknowingly stumbled into a dangerous task.

My Thoughts- Well, one thing’s for sure, you’ll either be annoyed by Annie or you’ll just flat out hate her. She’s definitely a polarizing main character. Early on in the movie, you can clearly see Annie is a defiant and stubborn conservative. She’s a proud Donald Trump fan, and Dashcam is set during the social distancing and strict mask mandates period of the pandemic. So as soon as Annie encounters a situation where face masks are required, you just knew she was going to unload on the cafe owner about tyranny and human rights. Just think about any of the viral videos you might’ve seen three or four years ago, when someone didn’t want to wear a mask and said person went on a tirade. It’s the usual material about defying mask mandates, and you’ll quickly get a good idea about the foundation of Annie’s character.

The direction of Annie’s character is a strange one. Hardy lays it on so thick as Annie it’s to the point, where she’s basically a parody of a hardcore conservative and Trump supporter. Annie is loud, rude, vulgar, confrontational, and of course she has a Make America Great Again hat. Were they trying to mock Trump supporters? I lean in that direction, because Hardy is so over the top with her rants, and the way she constantly belittles and mocks Gemma about her Covid protocols and liberal beliefs is just too on the nose. And to top things off, a Donald Trump bobble head doll makes an appearance at the end. 

If you take away all the conservative and Trump flag waving stuff from Annie’s character, there’s still no denying she’s just not a nice person. Annie is someone who truly has no off switch. She’s kind of selfish, she steals Stretch’s car, and she inadvertently drags him into a life threatening situation.

Dashcam is shown through a live stream POV. It’s an attempted spin on the found-footage sub genre of horror, and it works most of the time. They stayed true to the live stream POV, with emojis popping up on the screen and Annie’s followers monitoring the chaos and posting comments. Annie hosts a stream named BandCar, where her followers comment one word and she finds a way to fit each word into a freestyle. The humor and the punchlines during the freestyles are hit and miss, and of course the shaky cam stuff gets tiresome after a while. Still, at least they stayed true to the POV for the realistic feel, and you do get the impression that you’re actually watching an unprecedented and chaotic live stream.

So there’s obviously something wrong with Angela. She’s got supernatural abilities, and Angela’s mother reveals another shocking secret about her. Angela’s actually a teenager, and well, that would explain why an elderly woman has an Ariana Grande tattoo. 

We never get a full and clear cut explanation behind Angela’s powers and her rapid aging, but there are some clues to sort of put the pieces of the puzzle in place. Angela is obviously an important part of some weird and creepy satanic cult. And it’s clear her body was used a vessel to birth a grotesque creature. Depending on how it’s done, I do prefer the mysterious approach to certain reveals. Angela’s story makes you think about how all these horrible things could’ve happened to her. In the one photo Angela’s mother shows Annie and Stretch, Angela clearly looks happy as a kid. Who could’ve done this to her? Why was she chosen for this horrible ritual?

Dashcam dishes out its fair share of blood and over the top gore. There’s the grisly and graphic scene, where Annie uses a steering wheel to break the mother’s arm, and Angela ripping off her mom’s head, ending with a fountain of blood shooting out of her neck. Stretch’s death scene, where Angela rips his throat out was truly nasty, and it’s a bummer for Stretch. He was a good and honest hard working guy, who stumbled into a bad situation.

Dashcam kicks into high gear during the home stretch to deliver a satisfying final act. The finale is tense and a real nail biter, as Annie fights off and kills the creature that grew out of Angela. Everything leading up to the final fight feels genuinely suspenseful, with Annie realizing she’s at the address where she was supposed to drop Angela off, to seeing the cult members commit a mass suicide together.

With all that said, the comedy in Dashcam is a bit too much at times. It undercuts some of the more serious moments, and I got the feeling I was watching a horror comedy and not a full on horror film. I loved the sequence in the dark forest, when Annie and Stretch were trying to escape and hide from Angela and her mother. Still, a lot of the jump scares are predictable, and you’ll still see some of the found footage cliches here. The shaky cam stuff is annoying, and it’s way too easy to see the jump scares coming, with the usual back and forth movements of the camera. You just know something or someone is going to pop up in the background when it happens.

Annie is a character with no real middle ground, and it’s kind of hard to root for her. She dragged Stretch into this mess, and he was killed by Angela. And I can’t forget about the two newlyweds who died in that firey car crash, when Annie and Stretch were trying to escape.

I’m still not sure why they felt the need to do the hardcore conservative and Trump supporter stuff with Annie’s character. It’s not like they were trying to make her a truly evil person. But Annie’s CONSTANT rants against liberals just keep going and going throughout the movie. It reaches a point where you’ll say, okay we get it? I just got the feeling they wanted to take a strange approach to make Annie as annoying as they possibly could to piss off the audience. But why would you do that to the protagonist/final girl? Yeah, Annie survived and went through absolute hell to do so, but in the end, Annie only has herself to blame for her selfish and unbelievably bad decisions.

Rating-5/10