As Above, So Below (2014)
Directed by John Erick Dowdle
When a team of explorers venture into the catacombs that lie beneath the streets of Paris, they uncover the dark secret that lies within this city of the dead.
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20 films that influenced As Above, So Below
What critics say influenced As Above, So Below
As far as horror movie premises go, that's a decent one, even if it is heavily referential, giving shout outs to everything from Neil Marshall's masterful subterranean chiller "The Descent" to the aforementioned "Flatliners," and a whole bunch of movies in between (the opening awkwardly apes "The Da Vinci Code," among others).
It’s a real shame, too, because director John Erick Dowdle–whose credits include 2008’s muddled Quarantine and 2010’s effective Devil— creates moments that recall the claustrophobic terror of the awesome spelunking epic The Descent .
In fact, the first part of As Above recalls the unnerving underground discomfort of The Descent, another caves-are-terrifying thriller.
In terms of the sheer claustrophobia seeping from its every pore, "As Above, So Below" reminds favorably of 2006's terrifying cave-diving thriller " The Descent ."
Instead, it inspires thoughts of the superior "The Descent," a genre classic that involved a group of women trapped in a cave.
He certainly borrows a few lessons from Niel Marshall’s The Descent – and then, takes those ideas a step further – using the setting of subterranean exploration as THE principal scare source and threat throughout the film.
Perdita Weeks is a strong and capable female lead, the film manages to borrow concepts from " The Blair Witch Project " and " Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade " and put its own spin on them, and the addition of alchemy is both warranted and a breath of fresh air to the horror franchise, but "As Above, So Below" mostly resorts to cliché tactics when it has so much more right within its grasp.
Faux-documentary style filmmaking was hard to come by before 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project,” a film that kickstarted a genre with a creative and commercial bang.
To the degree that it works ? in pictures like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity - it's because the ?captured on video?
It's all too easy to imagine how he and his cowriter brother, Drew, pitched their creation: The Blair Witch Project meets Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code, with a touch of Insidious!
While the film has a reasonably engaging cast and some decent scares, the script feels like an uneasy blend of The Blair Witch Project and Tomb Raider.
Perdita Weeks is a strong and capable female lead, the film manages to borrow concepts from " The Blair Witch Project " and " Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade " and put its own spin on them, and the addition of alchemy is both warranted and a breath of fresh air to the horror franchise, but "As Above, So Below" mostly resorts to cliché tactics when it has so much more right within its grasp.
No strangers to the found-footage game, the Brothers Dowdle (as they call their production shingle) already handled the lesser U.S. remake of [Rec], and while that movie at least had a decent pitch, this one feels like an oddly serious take on the tongue-in-cheek Venice cave sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
The other part is that the film's screenplay feels like it happened because the writers, brothers John Erick (who also directs) and Drew Dowdle, couldn't decide between ripping off The Da Vinci Code, the first two Harry Potter books, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , The Descent , The Divine Comedy, and Tomb Raider, and so they decided to go ahead and do all of them at once, and just for funsies, to mortar the dismal construct that resulted together with some insulting half-baked nonsense about people fighting their inner demons in what may or may not be the actual, literal Hell.
Surprisingly, the movie winds up living up to its auspicious beginning as it plays against its own conventions in the final act resulting in the best found-footage horror film since the first Paranormal Activity (2007).
To the degree that it works ? in pictures like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity - it's because the ?captured on video?
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It’s a shame, because such a fresh concept is wasted on a mixture of Indiana Jones, National Treasure, and every found footage horror movie you’ve ever turned off out of frustration – close, but no cigar.
The script written by Dowdle and his brother Drew is a neatly woven package of ideas that borrow elements from a variety of notable sources, including “The Descent,” “The Exorcist” and, to a more eccentric degree, “National Treasure” and “The Mummy.”
Half “National Treasure, ” half “The Descent,” but not half as good as either, the pic unearths found footage purgatory with startling accuracy.
Imagine the excitement of the rolling-boulder opening scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” stretched to feature length, then subtract such vital ingredients as John Williams’ pulse-elevating score, Douglas Slocombe’s visceral cinematography and Harrison Ford’s wry charisma, and you get “As Above, So Below,” in which a Lara Croft-like heroine assembles a team of expendable “cataphiles” (as catacomb obsessives call themselves) to locate the Philosopher’s Stone.
This week's "As Above, So Below," a grainy, archeology-themed found footage movie that uneasily mixes "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with "Flatliners," is the first effort under this new initiative.
As Above, So Below could have been a cross-breed between Tomb Raider, Raiders of the Lost Ark (that’s a reach, but stay with me), and Cloverfield.
For those hoping to find some truly disturbing secrets buried for generations beneath the surface, track down Gary Sherman’s 1972 “Death Line” (aka “Raw Meat”) instead.
Any horror film fan worthy of the name knows that the entrance to hell is in Brooklyn — a fact established in 1977 by Michael Winner’s The Sentinel — and no attempt to transfer this accolade to Paris is worth considering.
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As far as horror movie premises go, that's a decent one, even if it is heavily referential, giving shout outs to everything from Neil Marshall's masterful subterranean chiller "The Descent" to the aforementioned "Flatliners," and a whole bunch of movies in between (the opening awkwardly apes "The Da Vinci Code," among others).
It's all too easy to imagine how he and his cowriter brother, Drew, pitched their creation: The Blair Witch Project meets Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code, with a touch of Insidious!
The other part is that the film's screenplay feels like it happened because the writers, brothers John Erick (who also directs) and Drew Dowdle, couldn't decide between ripping off The Da Vinci Code, the first two Harry Potter books, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , The Descent , The Divine Comedy, and Tomb Raider, and so they decided to go ahead and do all of them at once, and just for funsies, to mortar the dismal construct that resulted together with some insulting half-baked nonsense about people fighting their inner demons in what may or may not be the actual, literal Hell.
The little-seen 2007 dud Catacombs already squandered such promise, but the Dowdle brothers (Devil, The Poughkeepsie Tapes) have decided to give it another go with As Above/So Below.
The hopelessly incoherent climax - ie there's just so much running and screaming - ensures that As Above So Below ends on a decidedly negative note, although it ultimately goes without saying that the film fares much, much better than that other Paris-catacombs thriller (2007's Catacombs).