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JeruZalem
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| Year: |
2015
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Director: |
Doron Paz, Yoav Paz
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| Stars: |
Yael Grobglas, Yon Tumarkin, Danielle Jadelyn, Tom Graziani, Sarel Piterman, Howard Rypp, Ami Smolartchik, Yoav Koresh, Ori Zaltzman, Fares Hananya, Itsko Yampulski, Mel Rosenberg, Danny Zahavi, Moran Zelma
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| Genre: |
Horror |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
There's a part of the Talmud that says there are three gates to Hell, one in the desert, one in the ocean and the third in Jerusalem, but how true that is the world had an inkling when some time ago the Vatican investigated the emergence of an apparently possessed young woman in the Israeli capital, and the footage they took of her recently leaked to the internet, not that many have seen it, though those who have aren’t sure what to make of it. One person who hasn't is Sarah Pullman (Danielle Jadelyn), who is going on holiday to Tel Aviv today with her best friend Rachel Klein (Yael Grobglas), and her father has given her a pair of internet-connected glasses to wear.
That might come in handy if you're, I don’t know, wishing to record every single thing that happens to you so we can watch it back later in film form, for that's what this was, one of those found footage horrors that had been ushered in by The Blair Witch Project back in 1999 and showed no signs of abating, no matter how often audiences would claim they were sick of them and wish filmmakers would move on to something else. But directors the Paz Brothers did have a gimmick further than that, as JeruZalem slotted into the category of those net-obsessed thrillers like Unfriended or Open Windows that stretched the possibilities of technology.
Indeed, the special glasses demonstrated here were pretty incredible, never running out of power, voice activated, identifying faces and linking to their information on social media, and no matter what Sarah endured they stayed with her, working away until the ending that puts an image in your mind which even though it wasn't the image on the screen, was rather ridiculous. Maybe demons are monsters for the consumer society as well? Speaking of which, although sold as an Israeli zombie flick, it was actually more elaborate than that, and really the only shambling undead we saw were at the start when the stunning specs allow Sarah to play a zombie-killer computer game.
For some, the idea that you could look at another person, or more pertinently another person could look at you, and they would know all they needed to about you thanks to those links to your online presence that the lenses threw up was a more chilling thought than the eruption of the actual apocalypse. This gave you plenty of time to think that over, especially in the first half when the story was less a horror and more a travelogue around the nooks and crannies of Jerusalem where it was shot, making it a very rare beast, a shocker made in the Middle East which at least offered a novelty for the more seasoned horror buff used to seeing the same old type of locations, be that urban or rural (this was effectively urban, but presenting a lot of history).
Sarah and Rachel also offered up a familiar trope of found footage horrors, which was annoying the dickens out of a significant portion of the audience, who took the first person point of view to consider the main character and whether they were acting believably or not, or more usually whether they were behaving like a proper individual would under extraordinary circumstances. If you felt like being judgemental, movies like JeruZalem were a gift, and would continue to be well into the future, but if you simply wanted a bit of running about, a dash of gore, some creature effects and so forth, then you couldn't deny the Paz Brothers rustled that up for you. That too much of it took place in semi-darkness, or even total darkness, was half-forgivable when it meant various stuff could jump out at you (or Sarah), and it had an interesting religious angle that got a little reactionary in places, but if you wanted a standard shakycam chiller, then you could do worse, depending on your tolerance for an oft-crying protagonist.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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