"Hunting Matthew Nichols" is a combination pseudo documentary, found footage, and cult movie. That means a lot of people speaking for the camera with title cards as to who they are, shaky camera work, and pure laziness.
Side note. I'm sick and tired of writers falling back on the satanic cult thing to wrap up a storyline. It's flat out lazy and the market has been flooded for a while. It feels like they can't quite figure out how to tie it all together so they slap a cult situation in and call it good. No. It is not good.
The premise here is that Tara is still looking for answers as to why her brother disappeared twenty three years earlier. Her brother's friend also disappeared with him but she really doesn't care about him. She's back in her remote hometown with a director and camera person. She also makes a big point of the fact that she's worn the necklace her brother gave her all those years. It's silver with a kind of viking/celtic design.
While she's there she interviews her own family, the family of the other kid, and the police investigator. These are mixed in with her going through the evidence box the police finally coughed up. Why that took twenty three years and a court order isn't really discussed. In the box is a bone totem along with video tapes, etc.
Oh. The movie also notes that the area has an unusually high number of unsolved missing persons cases.
What we get is Tara overacting about everything. The police investigator also gets her own overacted monologue. The other kid's father gets exposition but he keeps it lower key. We get a lot of talk talk talk. It's how we find out about a local legend where there's some sort of old settlement with a creepy guy who showed up once in a while then they all went missing.
The father of the other kid hands over an old journal that the boys supposedly found in the local history museum and seem to have taken because when Tara saw the footage of them finding it she went there and didn't find it. It has a pictorial version of that legend along with other stuff. Including, big surprise, what seems to be an incantation and ritual.
The found footage comes from tapes they find in the evidence box. Unusually we don't get to see much of it. We see the reactions to people watching it. Tara figures out the tape that was in the video camera found in a weird abandoned cabin the police decided was the last known location of the kids isn't in evidence. She has to get another court order for that.
The police investigator gets her monologue when Tara confronts her about the missing evidence. That's when the investigator says it was withheld for the public good and that she can't take Tara to the cabin (or give directions) because the city tore it down.
Tara does get the last tape and this is the most we see of the found footage. It's the standard horror stuff with scared people, voices off camera, and horror violence. Yeah. Given that Tara is adamant that they go to the site of the cabin.
The camera person quite wisely decides to nope out. The director has a brief internal struggle but does go. Off the two of them go into the woods with a map, some supplies, and hopefully an end to this rather drab and boring movie.
They get to the site. It's completely clear, as if there had never been a cabin. Being the careful people they are they set up their little pop tents in the clearing. Sigh.
Tara, being Tara, attempts to perform the ritual she found using her necklace, her blood, the bone totem, and what she found in the journal. It's a bust and they go to bed.
Except maybe not? Because they get woken up to find the cabin, right where it was before. Not that they know it was exact but hey, there's a cabin where there wasn't a cabin. So of course she goes in, in the middle of the night, after performing an unknown ritual. The director has an internal struggle then follows her in.
She's doing another ritual on the cabin floor and says she's in contact with her brother. This is where I kind of frown and wonder if it's a clue, a foreboding, or a mistake. She's using her necklace as the conduit and doing the "right for yes, left for no" form of contact. For every question where she says the answer is yes, the necklace is swinging left for her point of view. It's going to the right for the director (and camera) in front of her.
This is the only potentially interesting thing in the movie, in my opinion. Because it would have been a great way to forebode what's going to happen and how much she's caught up in her own needs. When she asks if she's speaking to her brother, it goes left from her point of view but she says it's proof it is him.
Anyway. Now we're into the cult thing. A door opens in the cabin and she's dragged into the darkness after she asks her brother to show himself. The director wisely beats feet out of there, dropping his camera in almost the exact place the evidence photos showed her brother's camera.
Tara does run out of the cabin saying she was wrong and it wasn't her brother. Duh. The director gets his foot caught in an old bear trap and kinda can't run much now. He blacks out (or something) and wakes up to see Tara standing naked in front of him, facing away and looking at a tree. He looks up to see other nekkid people with shiny eyes and decides that the bear trap ain't going to keep him there. She's got shiny eyes. He runs, leaving the camera. It shows a lot of people coming down from the tree and following him.
Credits roll.
A quick scene has the camera person running in the hospital and the director is in bed with bloody bandages around his face. He sits up and screams.
Now the movie is over.
Yeah. Not a lot I can say about this one. I guess we're supposed to think there's a cult out there that's taking people and they're living in the woods? There's something supernatural living in the deep woods? I dunno.
I do know that having Tara's obsession with finding out what happened to her brother just isn't that interesting. I found no compassion for her because she's a whiny, demanding bitch here. She shows up and disrupts people's lives for no good reason. She lies to the police investigator who told her to turn off the camera, she said she did, and the director is crouched outside the room with the camera on. Yeah, obsession. I get it. It still gets dull.
The whole cult thing also doesn't do anything. It comes out of nowhere. There's absolutely no indication that there's anything going on, except the statement about disappearances. No one in the town seems to know there's anything hinkey in the woods all around them. Plus the guy in the hospital would not have blood soaked bandages. Hospitals frown on that kind of thing when the patient is admitted and under care.
So I'd say skip this one as I say to skip so many of the horror movies being released. I honestly don't know why there's a glut of them now and why they're so bad. Independent filmmakers are not spending their money wisely if this is what they're choosing to make.
