Director Rob Savage captured that trapped feeling of lockdown with last summer’s buzziest horror movie, Host, a Zoom séance gone wrong. It established Savage as a filmmaker who wears his horror influences on his sleeves. His latest, filmed during the second lockdown, demonstrates that once again. Savage’s follow-up feature, DASHCAM, aims to achieve Sam Raimi levels of splatstick energy. It nails manic chaos, but the screenlife format hinders its success.
DASHCAM frames its story through a popular Livestream, Band Car, an improv music show in which an indie musician (Annie Hardy playing a dialed-up version of herself) comes up with songs on the spot while driving around her car. The songs pull from Annie’s live feed commenters, and she’s the precise type of loud, obnoxious online persona that induces instant cringe. Her exaggerated, over-the-top persona masks a depression over her pandemic life, and she decides to relocate to London to stay with a former bandmate. While out on the road working a food delivery shift, Annie gets stuck with a sickly older woman, propelling her and her online viewers into a high-octane chase that gets increasingly wilder by the hour.
Unlike the more stable camerawork that Zoom brought, everything captured on screen here comes from Annie’s live feed on her phone. When it’s fixed to her vehicle dashboard, it’s easy to focus on what’s in the fame. But Annie brings her phone with her everywhere, and the events of the evening often require her to leave the car repeatedly. It means she’s zipping along from set piece to set piece. The more Savage attempts to channel Evil Dead levels of splatstick, the more it becomes different to see what’s happening. If you’re prone to motion sickness, the shaky cam will trigger it early on, and it only gets worse the more Annie’s night turned into an unrelenting series of demonic horror.
Savage, who co-wrote the feature with Host’s Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd, leaves viewers in the dark as much as Annie for what’s happening. She’s stuck with a stranger that won’t go away, which causes a series of action horror sequences and a whole lot of various bodily fluids splattering across backseats, pavement, restaurants, abandoned carnivals, and more. The set pieces themselves are inspired when you can see them, as Annie’s phone erratically bounces about as she runs from danger. All of that still sounds cool, in theory, and but its execution and limited scope of vision make DASHCAM feel like a disconnected series of incredible horror moments rather than a coherent narrative. It doesn’t help that you’re more eager to be rid of the selfish and anarchic Annie than you are her passenger.
Much like Host, there’s social commentary to be found on our current state of things nestled in the details; what it’s saying gets muddled by Annie’s Livestream persona. The Maga hat that she dons, her wall full of crucifixes before heading for London, or a brief flash of a Trump bobblehead- it’s not clear if DASHCAM is commenting on America itself or Americans. The entire setup sees its extremely impolite American crashing the pad of her polite London pal in the rudest manner possible, then dragging him into the danger against his will. So, the message likely reads the same regardless. You can find other connections to Host sprinkled throughout, some obvious and some deeper laid Easter eggs.
DASHCAM aspires to achieve the same levels of unbridled mania and nihilism of Evil Dead, or even V/H/S/2, putting its characters through the physical wringer in a nonstop onslaught of visceral terror. Unlike its influences, though, you’re actively rooting against its lead. The more Savage introduces cool ideas or new levels of bold horror, the less you’re able to see it. Much of what works about his latest effort gets obscured by its format. That Annie inspires repulsion is the point, but it doesn’t do DASHCAM any favors either. If you can get past one of horror’s most grating characters in recent memory and a constant barrage of shaky cam, there’s a gem of a splatstick horror movie buried somewhere within. For many, though, it’ll likely earn an unfollow.
