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Aside from me been away from the movies and tv series scene I finally had sometime last night to sit down and watch some content, before noticing that Hokum (2026) drop I was looking for some horror movie and stumble into Bodycam (2025), after watching the trailer and Rotten Tomatoes rating I was like "this shouldnt be that bad", so decided to give it shot since critics gave it an 85% so I was like, probably the audience didnt get it or was too technical / uncommon style, thats totally me. I went in with zero expectations, I also figure out there was already some noise about the whole naming situation before this one even dropped, but none of that bs matters once you actually press play because this thing grabs you from the opening minute and does not let go for a good long while, at least that how I felt for about 20 minutes into the movie. The setup is kinda simple with two cops named Bryce and Jackson roll up to a domestic disturbance call, step into a dark house with the power completely out, and almost immediately find a man standing in a basement corner facing the wall like almost broken like wth is with this guy, no movement, no response, just standing there in the dark being absolutely terrifying in the most low key way possible, at most your brain kicks in "zombie drug". That image alone sets the whole temperature of the movie because you understand right away this is not going to be a standard cop drama, something is deeply wrong in this neighborhood and the officers are the last ones to figure it out. I respect how the movie commits to the idea that the community around these cops already knows about everything there is going on, its like the goverment forgot about them period, and you can tell the cops sense it, they feel it, the people being policed are living inside it while the guys with the badges are clueless tourists walking into something way above their pay grade.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37538172/
- Platform: PRIME VIDEO
Rottentomatoes Rating
The opening sequence at that house is straight up nightmare fuel and the camera work sells it verry well because you are stuck in that bodycam perspective with no escape, even trying to look other way but you cant, watching people stand in corners like mannequins and getting zero answers about why any of it is happening. One of the officers named Jackson has a mother named Ally who carries herself like a neighborhood shaman, someone with one foot in the real world and one foot in whatever spiritual current runs through that block, and the moment she tells the officers they cannot stay at her home you immediately understand she knows something the cameras are never going to capture and not giving up right away. There is a sequence where Jackson keeps driving away from the house only to loop right back to the same address no matter which road he takes, and that section of the movie is disturbing and it was kinda cool because it gaves me "From" vibes, a series that Im about to catch up.The movie was cleaver taking something as mundane as driving around a city and turns it into a trap with no exit, adding that creepy touch. The woman from the house who runs outside and tells them they owe the Underman is the kind of line that at first makes you think "owe who?.." but then the creepyness kicks it, it does not feel silly or forced, it feels like a piece of a very dark puzzle you are not supposed to fully understand yet, and the movie is smart enough to not over explain it. The way the basement is used as this central location where everything eventually collapses inward is smart for a budget movie like this, everything keeps pulling back toward that same dark space like gravity, and each time you return to it the feeling is slightly worse than the last.
Now here is where I have to be straight because the middle of this movie gets kinda lazy and starts to drag like its momentarly out of fuel and its hard to not notice, the pacing goes sideways when Bryce starts searching for his pregnant wife Michelle through what feels like an endless nightmare sequence, and Jackson separately gets pulled deeper into the looping house trap, and while both ideas are creepy in concept the execution drags longer than it should for a movie that is only about 75 minutes long but honestly I think this happens most of the time when this kind of loop hole scenes show up, similar happens in Matrix series when Neo gets trap in the train station, I guess its because its very uncommon and boring the figuring out process because nothing else really happens and its by design. You would think a movie that short would keep things moving but somehow it still finds a way to stall out and when you are sitting there waiting for the momentum to come back in a 75 minute movie that is a real problem. The creature design for the Underman is interesting but the CGI quality drops off hard during the final part of the movie and there are moments where the thing looks like a character pulled out of a mid tier video game, which really undercuts the dread the movie spent so much time building before it. The scene where Bryce and Jackson visit Esposito; by the way Angel is so damn hot but on this movie she is like meh Remember her from Puppetman, anyways this time she plays a woman with the ability to delete body camera footage, hilarious although it adds a grounded tech element to what is otherwise a supernatural horror movie, but even that scene cannot fully rescue the momentum the middle section burns through. The infected tweakers surrounding the officers in the basement while everything collapses together is the kind of ending that wants to say something large about addiction and corruption eating a community from the inside out, and part of me thinks they almost got there, which is the frustrating part, because almost is not the same thing.
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What separates Bodycam from the usual Shudder dump is that it is not interested in playing the jump scare lottery that most found footage movies rely on to keep people awake, this thing is way closer in spirit to a creepypasta or an SCP entry where the horror comes from the wrongness of the situation rather than something jumping out of a closet. The found footage format actually earns its keep here because the bodycam perspective creates a claustrophobia that a traditional camera setup could never replicate, you are stuck inside the point of view of people making terrible decisions and you cannot look away or get a wider angle on the situation. Sean Rogerson and Jaime M. Callica are doing real work in this thing, the kind of work where you keep buying into the situation even when the script is not giving them a lot to work with, and that matters a lot in a movie this stripped down because there is nowhere to hide when the effects let you down and the writing goes thin. Compared to something like REC or even the more recent The Outwaters, Bodycam does not have the technical polish or the unhinged ambition of those movies but it has a social consciousness that most genre movies in this space do not bother with, the idea that the evil is connected to what these specific officers did, that the Underman is almost an extension of the moral rot they carry with them, is a legitimately interesting angle that I wish they had pushed even harder instead of letting it stay in the background while the creature effects took over.
I am landing on a 6 out of 10 for Bodycam because I dont want to be as generous as the critics on RTT, I always try to stay in between because I end to try to understand why the audience didnt get it, imo this time it was the spiritual theme and the fact that the time loop took too much out of it so people get bored and I mean that as a real recommendation for anyone who is into low budget horror that actually has a point of view, its like an opal stone, you never know if its worth anything on the inside. The two lead performances from Rogerson and Callica are doing more work than the script sometimes deserves and the atmosphere in that first half is unsettling in a way that a lot of bigger budget productions cannot touch. The Underman creature lunge at the end is a badass final image even if the CGI makes you flinge a little, it commits to the bit and has enough force to make you feel alert enought with a small dopamine rush despite everything that went sideways in the middle. If you can ride out some pacing issues and digital effects that clearly hit the wall of their budget, the journey down into that basement is worth your time on a Tuesday movie night like it did for me, very casual improvise movie night with the lights off, headphones on and no interruptions, just go in knowing it is not perfect and you are going to have a damn good time with it.
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