Horror Movie Review: P.O.V. (2014)

Written and directed by Richard Anthony Dunford, P.O.V. is not a found footage per-se even if it has many of the same problems. Instead we see the events of this movie from the perspective of the main character Zack.

Played by Tom Clear, Zack has been recently dumped by his long-term girlfriend and isn’t doing so well. To try and cheer him up, his older brother Sam (Karl Kennedy-Williams) throws a party at an abandoned retirement home that he has been refurbishing.

Can you guess why it was abandoned? If you said something like ‘everyone died and it’s now said to be haunted by spirits/demons/ghosts’, congratulations you win the joy of continuing to watch this average horror.

As is par for the course we find out the buildings history by one character retelling the legend for everyone to enjoy. Thanks exposition monkey.

Unsurprisingly it doesn’t take long afterwards for things to start going wrong. However, it’s not the ghostly-goings on that you expect. Instead what we get here are demons. A curse that sees the majority of the party goers become possessed by demons. It’s kind of like Night of the Demons but nowhere as fun.

There’re far too many flaws in P.O.V. to ignore starting with the poor acting and really unlikable characters. We don’t know enough about Zack to really give a damn about his relationship woes and the only other character who makes an impression is Sam. However, his ‘aggressive meathead’ character is just too over the top. The man’s idea of a joke is to tell his brother that he slept with his girlfriend and then tries to start a fight with him. What a guy.

Then there are the demonic effects. The eyeless ones look alright and the actor’s disembodiment style has a little bit of creepiness to it. However, the main demonic cast look absolutely awful.

What P.O.V. does do well is ambiguity. You see leading up to the demonic possessions a group of the party-goers took drugs. An unknown drug that came in pill form. This has an effect on Zack as we see from his point of view. So as the movie goes on you start to wonder if he’s actually seeing demonic possessions at all.

In a movie with better acting, better visuals and a braver approach to the ending, this would have been an interesting development. That being said, it’s not like we haven’t seen this idea before.