Let's Get The Bay, Movie, shown in Georgetown! We Made it! Let's See it!
The Issue
We need to support and promote solid, encouraging events and happenings in this town. If we don't do it, who will?
REVIEW FROM THE TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL
TORONTO – An unexpected detour for director Barry Levinson into mock-doc horror, The Bay is an unnerving eco-disaster thriller that refreshes the found-footage trend with surprising effectiveness. Playing by classic B-Movie genre rules but with a mostly convincing veneer of reportorial realism, this lean, micro-budget entry sustains tension while delivering squirms, even if it drops the ball in the wrap-up.
OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDS No Place on Earth: Toronto Review Seven Psychopaths: Toronto Review Liverpool: Toronto Review Mr. Pip: Toronto Review Song for Marion: Toronto Review Great Expectations: Toronto Review Inescapable: Toronto Review RELATED TOPICS •Toronto International Fil...At this point in the game, the bastard children of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity have sorely tested the limits of films in which a single camera is somehow never switched off or put down for long. Such lapses in credibility are not totally absent here.
QUIZ: Hey Hollywood, Test Your Toronto IQ
But Levinson and screenwriter Michael Wallach mostly manage to circumvent the problem by gathering multiple media sources. These include news cameras, police vehicle cams, surveillance video, smart phones, Androids, Skype and underwater goggle cameras. On top of that are sound sources such as recorded phone conversations, 911 calls, scientific and medical logs and Coast Guard transmissions.
Editor Aaron Yanes makes nimble use of the disparate visual and audio textures to thread together an urgently paced recap of Independence Day 2009 in the seaside town of Claridge, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay. (The actual shooting location was Georgetown, South Carolina.) Over the course of 24 hours, events spiral into a full-blown catastrophe that claims hundreds of lives.
The extent of the calamity is conveyed up-front, as Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue) addresses the camera with grave seriousness to blow the lid off secrets carefully concealed from the media. The conceit is that a wealth of digital evidence was confiscated in the wake of the mass tragedy and has been accessed three years later via a Govleaks website.
An inexperienced student reporter interning at the time for a local news channel, Donna was assigned to do fluff coverage of the Fourth of July festivities. Levinson and Wallach nod wryly to every watery terror movie sinceJaws and the original Piranha in this setup, as Donna takes in the crab-eating contest and interviews the beauty queen, who gushes, “I think it’s every girl’s dream to be Miss Crustacean!”
VIDEO: Inside THR's Video Diary Featuring the Toronto Film Festival's Leading Talent
Cutting back and forth between her awkward TV coverage and shaken present-day interview, Donna chats on-camera with the Mayor (Frank Deal), oblivious to his culpability in ignoring danger signs and to the fact that he would be dead several hours later.
We quickly learn that the bodies of two divers were fished out of the bay and while their deaths were blamed on rogue bull sharks, the bites didn’t fit that profile. There’s also the matter of 45 million pounds of chicken excrement being dumped in the water each year from the massive local poultry industry, all of it loaded with chemical steroids. Then there was that nuclear reactor leak in 2002 that caused gradual ground seepage.
When people start turning up with bleeding rashes, boils, bubbling lesions and parts of their tongues missing, The Bay takes shape like a viral epidemic thriller in the vein of Contagion. Working ER at the hospital, Dr. Abrams (Stephen Kunken) is mobbed by patients presenting bizarre symptoms resistant to treatment. His examinations point to twin parasites eating their bodies externally and internally. (Watch the trailer below.)
Basing their story on the toxic pollutants and flesh-eating bacteria increasingly prevalent in the Chesapeake Bay, Levinson and Wallach cook up a mutant breed of the isopod that enters a fish through its gills and devours its tongue, replacing that organ with its own body. Of course it’s not long before humans are playing host.
PHOTOS: Top Ten Looks at the Toronto Film Festival
There are holes, such as failing to provide an adequate explanation as to why the parasites all get crazy hungry on the same day. But that’s also part of the fun of a movie that mixes an earnest faux-documentary cautionary tale with horror and gore conventions.
Character development is less a priority than the escalating sense of alarm, and the sinister evidence that authorities outside Claridge are working on containment, not solution.
In addition to Donna, who continues documenting events with her cameraman even after the station shuts down her broadcasts on FBI orders, there are a handful of key conduits to the story. Dr. Abrams conducts a long Skype exchange with the Center for Disease Control, refusing to abandon the hospital even after his staff has fled. Prior to the July 4 events, oceanographers Sam (Christopher Denham) and Jaqueline (Nansi Aluka) record their studies of infected fish, discovering that much of the bay is a marine dead zone. And a young married couple, Alex (Will Rogers) and Stephanie (Kristen Connolly), shoot vacation video as they sail in from another town, bringing their baby to visit his grandparents.
While Connolly was one of the leads in The Cabin in the Woods, the actors mainly hail from the supporting-player end of the film spectrum, or from the New York stage. Using unfamiliar faces here was a good choice in upping the sense of ordinary people in an it-could-happen predicament, though Donohue is a little flat as the central witness. Denham (a lead in the indie drama Sound of My Voice, also seen at the Toronto festival in Ben Affleck’s Argo) is an appealing, wiry presence; he has a nice running joke concerning Sam’s difficulty understanding his colleague’s French accent.
Once they have laid waste to the entire town, littering Main Street with half-chewed corpses, the filmmakers are less resourceful in finding a way to wrap things up. The ending is rather abrupt, and sticklers for rulebook horror plotting might gripe that we don’t get to see someone save the day. But the evidence of a government cover-up to avoid widespread disruption of summer tourism and trade along the Eastern seaboard gives a chilling note to the conclusion. While the visceral scares are a distant second to the tense atmosphere, Levinson maintains suspense, aided by Marcelo Zarvos’ ominous score.
Stepping outside his standard range and angling for a different demographic, the director has found a novel way to expand his collection of Baltimore movies.
Venue: Toronto Film Festival (Midnight Madness; Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions; opens Nov. 2)
Production companies: Baltimore Pictures, Haunted Movie
Cast: Will Rogers, Kristen Connolly, Kether Donohue, Frank Deal, Stephen Kunken, Christopher Denham, Nansi Aluka
Director: Barry Levinson
Screenwriter: Michael Wallach; story: Levinson, Wallach
Producers: Barry Levinson, Jason Blum, Steven Schneider, Oren Peli
Executive producers: Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Jason Sosnoff, Colin Strause Greg Strause
Director of photography: Josh Nussbaum
Production designer: Lee Bonner
Music: Marcelo Zarvos
Costume designer: Emmie Holmes
Editor: Aaron Yanes
Visual effects: Hydraulx
Sales: IM Global
R rating, 84 minutes
ABOUT THE MOVIE
ltimore-born Barry Levinson is yet another established studio writer-director who is making his way in the strange new world of indie cinema. He's in Toronto with Midnight Madness entry "The Bay" (Roadside, November 2) an horrific R-rated found-footage thriller about a deadly flesh-eating bacteria contaminating his beloved Chesapeake Bay. This kind of outbreak could actually happen, writes Levinson in this exclusive director's statement:
Barry Levinson
There’s a flesh-eating bacteria residing in the Chesapeake Bay. It doesn’t attack everyone who goes in the water. Just some. But for those who get infected, it could mean the loss of a leg, an arm... or some other part of the body. And if you don’t act quickly enough, you're dead in twenty-four hours. This bacteria becomes more and more prevalent each year.
Approximately 40% of the Bay consists of “marine dead zones”. Hundreds of thousands of fish are showing up dead on beaches, and no one knows exactly why. Even the sea gulls won’t eat those fish. In waters around the world, a creature is surfacing that was once confined to the Gulf of California called the tongue-eating isopod. It’s a parasite that enters a fish through the gills and then eats away until it replaces the fish’s tongue with its own body. One was recently discovered off the coast of England that was over two feet long; it was trying to burrow its way into a research submarine, mistaking it for a dead whale. And they are vicious. This tongue-eating isopod can now be found in over a third of certain fish populations.
All this serves as the basis for The Bay. Take the facts, let them reach a tipping point, and you have the perfect storm for an ecological disaster of the first order. One that is deadly, terrifying, and all-too-real. I stress the reality because in 2010 I was actually approached to do a documentary about the Chesapeake, which intrigued me, but Frontline did an excellent documentary on the subject and yet no actions were ever taken to clean up the toxic waste. In some ways we may be too overwhelmed with facts, and so I thought it would be better to blend the facts into a storytelling format and make a fictional film that feels like a documentary. Do it on a micro budget, use no famous actors, and shoot it with consumer cameras like iPhones and point and shoots to create an authentic visual language of found footage. In the end, we used 21 digital platforms. We took all kinds of steps like this to make a hyper-realistic found footage movie.
Hopefully people will walk away from the film not only entertained but somewhat disturbed. That’s the point of it. It’s not a ghost story where you only remain frightened while you are watching but then leave the theater and go on with your life. It’s a story that should scare you during and after it’s over. When you go home. Because it is about real things. Real things we should perhaps be paying more attention to. And as our characters grow increasingly aware of and troubled by the strange-but-true happenings, reacting to them in a variety of ways - emotional, psychological, and practical – we should seriously ask ourselves what we would do if we found ourselves in a similar situation. Maybe at the end of the day, The Bay is a cautionary tale. A tale that both entertains and disturbs.
The Issue
We need to support and promote solid, encouraging events and happenings in this town. If we don't do it, who will?
REVIEW FROM THE TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL
TORONTO – An unexpected detour for director Barry Levinson into mock-doc horror, The Bay is an unnerving eco-disaster thriller that refreshes the found-footage trend with surprising effectiveness. Playing by classic B-Movie genre rules but with a mostly convincing veneer of reportorial realism, this lean, micro-budget entry sustains tension while delivering squirms, even if it drops the ball in the wrap-up.
OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDS No Place on Earth: Toronto Review Seven Psychopaths: Toronto Review Liverpool: Toronto Review Mr. Pip: Toronto Review Song for Marion: Toronto Review Great Expectations: Toronto Review Inescapable: Toronto Review RELATED TOPICS •Toronto International Fil...At this point in the game, the bastard children of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity have sorely tested the limits of films in which a single camera is somehow never switched off or put down for long. Such lapses in credibility are not totally absent here.
QUIZ: Hey Hollywood, Test Your Toronto IQ
But Levinson and screenwriter Michael Wallach mostly manage to circumvent the problem by gathering multiple media sources. These include news cameras, police vehicle cams, surveillance video, smart phones, Androids, Skype and underwater goggle cameras. On top of that are sound sources such as recorded phone conversations, 911 calls, scientific and medical logs and Coast Guard transmissions.
Editor Aaron Yanes makes nimble use of the disparate visual and audio textures to thread together an urgently paced recap of Independence Day 2009 in the seaside town of Claridge, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay. (The actual shooting location was Georgetown, South Carolina.) Over the course of 24 hours, events spiral into a full-blown catastrophe that claims hundreds of lives.
The extent of the calamity is conveyed up-front, as Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue) addresses the camera with grave seriousness to blow the lid off secrets carefully concealed from the media. The conceit is that a wealth of digital evidence was confiscated in the wake of the mass tragedy and has been accessed three years later via a Govleaks website.
An inexperienced student reporter interning at the time for a local news channel, Donna was assigned to do fluff coverage of the Fourth of July festivities. Levinson and Wallach nod wryly to every watery terror movie sinceJaws and the original Piranha in this setup, as Donna takes in the crab-eating contest and interviews the beauty queen, who gushes, “I think it’s every girl’s dream to be Miss Crustacean!”
VIDEO: Inside THR's Video Diary Featuring the Toronto Film Festival's Leading Talent
Cutting back and forth between her awkward TV coverage and shaken present-day interview, Donna chats on-camera with the Mayor (Frank Deal), oblivious to his culpability in ignoring danger signs and to the fact that he would be dead several hours later.
We quickly learn that the bodies of two divers were fished out of the bay and while their deaths were blamed on rogue bull sharks, the bites didn’t fit that profile. There’s also the matter of 45 million pounds of chicken excrement being dumped in the water each year from the massive local poultry industry, all of it loaded with chemical steroids. Then there was that nuclear reactor leak in 2002 that caused gradual ground seepage.
When people start turning up with bleeding rashes, boils, bubbling lesions and parts of their tongues missing, The Bay takes shape like a viral epidemic thriller in the vein of Contagion. Working ER at the hospital, Dr. Abrams (Stephen Kunken) is mobbed by patients presenting bizarre symptoms resistant to treatment. His examinations point to twin parasites eating their bodies externally and internally. (Watch the trailer below.)
Basing their story on the toxic pollutants and flesh-eating bacteria increasingly prevalent in the Chesapeake Bay, Levinson and Wallach cook up a mutant breed of the isopod that enters a fish through its gills and devours its tongue, replacing that organ with its own body. Of course it’s not long before humans are playing host.
PHOTOS: Top Ten Looks at the Toronto Film Festival
There are holes, such as failing to provide an adequate explanation as to why the parasites all get crazy hungry on the same day. But that’s also part of the fun of a movie that mixes an earnest faux-documentary cautionary tale with horror and gore conventions.
Character development is less a priority than the escalating sense of alarm, and the sinister evidence that authorities outside Claridge are working on containment, not solution.
In addition to Donna, who continues documenting events with her cameraman even after the station shuts down her broadcasts on FBI orders, there are a handful of key conduits to the story. Dr. Abrams conducts a long Skype exchange with the Center for Disease Control, refusing to abandon the hospital even after his staff has fled. Prior to the July 4 events, oceanographers Sam (Christopher Denham) and Jaqueline (Nansi Aluka) record their studies of infected fish, discovering that much of the bay is a marine dead zone. And a young married couple, Alex (Will Rogers) and Stephanie (Kristen Connolly), shoot vacation video as they sail in from another town, bringing their baby to visit his grandparents.
While Connolly was one of the leads in The Cabin in the Woods, the actors mainly hail from the supporting-player end of the film spectrum, or from the New York stage. Using unfamiliar faces here was a good choice in upping the sense of ordinary people in an it-could-happen predicament, though Donohue is a little flat as the central witness. Denham (a lead in the indie drama Sound of My Voice, also seen at the Toronto festival in Ben Affleck’s Argo) is an appealing, wiry presence; he has a nice running joke concerning Sam’s difficulty understanding his colleague’s French accent.
Once they have laid waste to the entire town, littering Main Street with half-chewed corpses, the filmmakers are less resourceful in finding a way to wrap things up. The ending is rather abrupt, and sticklers for rulebook horror plotting might gripe that we don’t get to see someone save the day. But the evidence of a government cover-up to avoid widespread disruption of summer tourism and trade along the Eastern seaboard gives a chilling note to the conclusion. While the visceral scares are a distant second to the tense atmosphere, Levinson maintains suspense, aided by Marcelo Zarvos’ ominous score.
Stepping outside his standard range and angling for a different demographic, the director has found a novel way to expand his collection of Baltimore movies.
Venue: Toronto Film Festival (Midnight Madness; Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions; opens Nov. 2)
Production companies: Baltimore Pictures, Haunted Movie
Cast: Will Rogers, Kristen Connolly, Kether Donohue, Frank Deal, Stephen Kunken, Christopher Denham, Nansi Aluka
Director: Barry Levinson
Screenwriter: Michael Wallach; story: Levinson, Wallach
Producers: Barry Levinson, Jason Blum, Steven Schneider, Oren Peli
Executive producers: Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Jason Sosnoff, Colin Strause Greg Strause
Director of photography: Josh Nussbaum
Production designer: Lee Bonner
Music: Marcelo Zarvos
Costume designer: Emmie Holmes
Editor: Aaron Yanes
Visual effects: Hydraulx
Sales: IM Global
R rating, 84 minutes
ABOUT THE MOVIE
ltimore-born Barry Levinson is yet another established studio writer-director who is making his way in the strange new world of indie cinema. He's in Toronto with Midnight Madness entry "The Bay" (Roadside, November 2) an horrific R-rated found-footage thriller about a deadly flesh-eating bacteria contaminating his beloved Chesapeake Bay. This kind of outbreak could actually happen, writes Levinson in this exclusive director's statement:
Barry Levinson
There’s a flesh-eating bacteria residing in the Chesapeake Bay. It doesn’t attack everyone who goes in the water. Just some. But for those who get infected, it could mean the loss of a leg, an arm... or some other part of the body. And if you don’t act quickly enough, you're dead in twenty-four hours. This bacteria becomes more and more prevalent each year.
Approximately 40% of the Bay consists of “marine dead zones”. Hundreds of thousands of fish are showing up dead on beaches, and no one knows exactly why. Even the sea gulls won’t eat those fish. In waters around the world, a creature is surfacing that was once confined to the Gulf of California called the tongue-eating isopod. It’s a parasite that enters a fish through the gills and then eats away until it replaces the fish’s tongue with its own body. One was recently discovered off the coast of England that was over two feet long; it was trying to burrow its way into a research submarine, mistaking it for a dead whale. And they are vicious. This tongue-eating isopod can now be found in over a third of certain fish populations.
All this serves as the basis for The Bay. Take the facts, let them reach a tipping point, and you have the perfect storm for an ecological disaster of the first order. One that is deadly, terrifying, and all-too-real. I stress the reality because in 2010 I was actually approached to do a documentary about the Chesapeake, which intrigued me, but Frontline did an excellent documentary on the subject and yet no actions were ever taken to clean up the toxic waste. In some ways we may be too overwhelmed with facts, and so I thought it would be better to blend the facts into a storytelling format and make a fictional film that feels like a documentary. Do it on a micro budget, use no famous actors, and shoot it with consumer cameras like iPhones and point and shoots to create an authentic visual language of found footage. In the end, we used 21 digital platforms. We took all kinds of steps like this to make a hyper-realistic found footage movie.
Hopefully people will walk away from the film not only entertained but somewhat disturbed. That’s the point of it. It’s not a ghost story where you only remain frightened while you are watching but then leave the theater and go on with your life. It’s a story that should scare you during and after it’s over. When you go home. Because it is about real things. Real things we should perhaps be paying more attention to. And as our characters grow increasingly aware of and troubled by the strange-but-true happenings, reacting to them in a variety of ways - emotional, psychological, and practical – we should seriously ask ourselves what we would do if we found ourselves in a similar situation. Maybe at the end of the day, The Bay is a cautionary tale. A tale that both entertains and disturbs.
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Petition created on September 6, 2012