14 Cameras

A lot of 14 Cameras‘ shortcomings can be at least partially attributed to screenwriter Victor Zarcoff, who both wrote and directed the previous film. This one is largely plotless, and the script fails to develop any memorable or sympathetic characters for the audience to root for – neither in the vacationing upper-middle-class family that rents Gerald’s camera-laden home through an Airbnb-like website, nor in the pair of kidnapping victims (Brianne Moncrief and Chelsea Edmundson) held prisoner in his bunker.

That leaves Gerald himself to carry the movie, and while Archambault’s performance is head-and-shoulders above those of his co-stars, he’s forced to spend far too much of his screen time either stumbling around and grunting incoherently or staring slack-jawed into monitors or camera lenses. This just isn’t a unique or interesting enough heavy to build a horror franchise around; he’s simply a perfunctorily lurching, slovenly brute, a collection of worn-out tropes rather than a fully realized character. It might be that, by making Gerald so essentially faceless and refusing to explain what drives him, Zarcoff is trying to impart the frightening notion that there are lots of people out there who harbor his same perversions, but the attempt falls largely flat because he looks and acts so obviously like a common horror-movie villain.

“…keeping the nudity and gore limited, leaving the sickest implications to viewers’ imaginations…”

Co-directors Seth Fuller and Scott Hussion, making their feature debut, at least manage to orchestrate a handful of well-executed jump scares, and, ironically, when the film mostly drops its surveillance-camera device in the third act, the ensuing stalk-and-chase mayhem makes for some of its best-handled and most compelling moments of suspense. Fuller’s cinematography isn’t half-bad, either, providing some needed visual interest by juxtaposing glitchy, grainy spy-cam footage with the sleeker, more traditionally cinematic look favored by the rest of the film. On top of that, the directors show a surprising amount of restraint considering how tailor-made for gratuitous T&A and violence the movie’s premise is, keeping the nudity and gore limited and mostly leaving the sickest implications of the story to viewers’ imaginations – for a film that so breathlessly warns of the dangers of taking a shower, you at least won’t feel like you need one as soon as it’s over.