REVIEW - SXTAPE (BERNARD ROSE)

There's a numbing sadness to sxtape's first half, a sense of loneliness and futility that pervades every aspect of Bernard Rose's shlocky cash-grab. It's in the low-grade digital video. It's in the years-old found footage style. It's in the cheap and cheerless obsession with sex - puerile and prudish in equal amounts. It's in the narrow narrative focus, suggesting as much a miniscule budget as an apparent isolation in these characters' existences. It's in the hopelessness of these lives too, so aimless, wholly wanting for both purpose and prospects. It's in the casting, as performers of negligible ability barely even try in roles they somehow simultaneously know are of no consequence and which will further their careers not one jot, admit are yet not even beneath them, and think are deserving of some degree of integrity. It's in Rose's presence - this is the kind of shit one expects from him, though never before has it been quite this shitty. That soul-sapping sadness itself is sapped away by sxtape's second half, in which the dreariest horror cliches are warmed up on a fraction of the budget required to make them work. The corniest in-camera effects aren't enough to distract from the total lack of effort in executing the physical horror; we're this close from seeing hands pushing rocking chairs or wires holding people aloft, and all that stops us short from noticing these details is that sxtape doesn't even reach that high. It supposedly supplants real terror for women in white dresses standing behind doors, and nosebleeds. And the saddest thing about sxtape becomes how a film which promised to be just awful turns out to be truly, entirely, wholeheartedly awful.