My Little Eye (2002) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

My Little Eye is a hybrid between reality TV and an old-fashioned haunted house movie. A web-based show like Big Brother offers a bunch of young adults a million dollars if they can stay together in a remote mansion for six months. The catch is that all five of the contestants must make it, or nobody wins.

Everything they do is broadcast to the internet via dozens of cameras.

Or so they are led to believe.

As time goes on, the contestants begin to suspect that there are insidious forces at play in the contest. At first they suspect that the people who run the show are staging various events to get the contestants to leave, presumably so the mysterious "company" won't have to pay the million dollars. As more time goes on, they begin to suspect that the deepest levels of the secret are much more sinister than they had suspected, and that they are actually participants in a completely different show from the one they signed up for.

But what exactly are the participating in? And is there a spy in their own midst as well? Or is everything simply as it should be, but distorted by their cabin fever? 

The movie is barely OK. It's actually two movies compressed into one. The first hour or so is a slow-paced suspenseful mystery, during which we join their search for a explanation to various events which may or may not have been staged by the company. The last third is a typical hyperkinetic slasher cut-'em-up gorefest. The two halves are each good at what they are trying to do, but I'm not sure that the two go together that well. That is a difficult transition to manage, to be sure. The filming technique is neo-realism - ala Blair Witch. The film deliberately uses grainy images from the web-cams to make the audience feel like a member of the fictitious web site watching in a browser window.

The DVD is much better than the film itself. It is quite innovative. The DVD has two versions of the film, regular and interactive. In order to participate in the interactive version, you have to enter a secret password, which is hidden somewhere in the DVD package. Once you figure that out and log in, you watch the interactive version of the film in a simulated browser window, and you are able to switch from camera to camera, or to view archive footage from events that transpired before the movie began.

That is a pretty cool feature. Of all the DVDs I have seen, this one comes the closest to using the full potential of the medium.

I guess I should point out the good news and bad news as that multiple camera technique relates to the nudity. The good news is that you can view the sex scene from any of four different cameras, and can switch back and forth any time you please. The bad news is that the image quality sucks on all of them - they're supposed to be web-cams, and they're operating in a dark bedroom, so ....

There is also a second disc with special features. Pretty cool package for a minor movie.

My Little Eye (2002) is a joint UK/US horror film, shot in Canada, and starring US actors. It has played festivals all over the world, and is now available in the US on DVD.

Five college students apply and are accepted to become members of a reality show on the Web. The rules are simple. None of them can leave the house during curfew, they are not allowed to cover any of the Web cams placed throughout the house, and al five must last 6 months to win the prize of #1M. When the story starts, the six months are nearly over and they are all coping, although they are getting a little sick of each other, and the situation.

Then things start going dramatically wrong. First, one is notified that his grandfather, who raised him, has died. Then one of the two women wakes up to find a bloody hammer in her bed. Their care packages get stranger. What used to always be food now has very strange items. Then people start to die.

About when the killing begins, they figure out how to connect a laptop to a GPS receiver and get on line. They discover that, far from being the celebrities they imagine themselves to be, their lives are such a well-kept secret that none of the search engines even list any of them. They finally find the site, with a cryptic URL and nearly impossible cryptography, and discover just how much trouble they are really in.

The entire film is shot with stationary cameras, all of the imagery is grainy, and half is green (infrared night shots). I found it one of the most boring films I have ever watched. Some critics compared it to Blair Witch, and praised its style. I didn't much like Blair Witch, but at least that film had sort of an unknown evil to build some feeling of dread. Here, there is very little mystery. Add terrible production values and weak acting, and I can't recommend it.

Scoop's additional note: It seems that the Region 1 DVD is just a straightforward movie, not the two-disk interactive version. That being the case, I must join Tuna in saying that the film alone is not worth seeing.