Movie Review - The Bay

The Bay (2012)

Starring Kether Donahue, Frank Deal, and Stephen Kunken

Directed by Barry Levinson

On July 4, 2009, something horrible happened in the Chesapeake Bay-side town of Claridge, Maryland.  As partygoers celebrated the day of our nation's birth, things took a turn for the worse as people began breaking out in massive rashes creating huge boils on their skin.  The outbreak led to an influx of patients at the local hospital where Dr. Jack Abrams (Stephen Kunken) tried everything he knew to solve the problem, only to have the conditions of patients worsen.  Not only did it appear that the rash was forming on the outside of the skin, but something was eating away at these patients from the inside in an attempt to get out.

What exactly caused this biomedical breakout in Claridge?  That's what The Bay attempts to answer through first-hand video accounts compiled by former news reporter Donna Thompson (Kether Donahue) who was a fresh-faced college intern reporting on the local Claridge holiday festivities when all hell broke loose putting her smack in the middle of the action. Donna managed to survive the ordeal that hundreds of people did not and after three years and numerous attempts to be quashed by the government, she has decided to videotape her story and release it to the public so they can see the environmental rigamarole our government enacted that played a huge role in the horrifying story of Claridge.

Of course, this is all fake and although I've certainly tired of the found footage genre, The Bay manages to elevate the latest horror craze by allowing the found footage to play like a thesis for Donna, helping her to stand up to the greater powers.  The ecological agenda that the film is certainly striving towards can be a little heavy-handed at times, but director Barry Levinson (best known for 80s hits like Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam) creates a crafty little low-budget horror film.  While it contains a really solid jump scare or two, there's an overarching sense of unease in The Bay thanks to the crazy notion that it's (sort of) possible something like this could happen.  While I doubt the government in this day and age could manage to cover up the near complete demise of a town (leading to the one incredibly unbelievable aspect of the film), the biological horror is something that does manage to put me on edge a little bit.  [See my love of Contagion as another recent example.]

It's obvious at times that The Bay is a low-budget flick -- the acting isn't exactly top notch, the production often reuses some non-important clips multiple times -- but this is a nice flick that managed to keep me on edge quite a bit of the time.

The RyMickey Rating:  B