Dashcam (2021) Review

Rob Savage’s zeitgeist horror hit Host brought him global acclaim and a deal with premiere fright-factory Blumhouse. His first film for the floaty chair logo’d studio is a spikier matter than that lockdown debut. Sure, Dashcam inspires similar ghost-train shrieks and cackles from the audience. Yet, where Host was a rollercoaster ride the whole family could enjoy (provided kids were about 13+), Savage’s sophomore movie is typified by its lead hellraiser: mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Said lead is “Annie Hardy,” an exaggerated (kind-of) version of lead Annie Hardy. Like her real-life counterpart, this Annie hosts Dash Car, a live-streamed internet show in which she drives around freestyling scatological, offensive raps ad-libbed from viewer comments.

Dashcam’s Annie has fled America for England. The aim is to export her abrasive, COVID-denying, MAGA-supporting brand of ill-informed libertarianism to this already septic isle. But first she must find digs, and imposes herself on former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), and his COVID-cautious girlfriend Gemma (Host’s troublemaker Jemma Moore, here the sensible one).

After one public outburst too many puts Annie in the doghouse, she flees in Stretch’s car to make more mischief. With camera constantly streaming to her loyal fans, Annie embarks upon a night of pandemic-bashing pandemonium. But the mayhem turns malevolent when she is paid to drive home the elderly, ill Angela (Angela Enahoro). The obnoxious influencer soon realises her Uber-like task will be uber-terrifying. As does Stretch, who arrives wanting his car back…

To reveal anymore would be to spoil the set-pieces and surprises Savage squeezes into a breathless 66 minutes (11mins of the 77min runtime are devoted to a filthy end credit rap). Although still working under COVID-restrictions, the director clearly relishes being able to scare up terrors in wide open spaces. With Blumhouse money to boot. The result is an experiential horror movie brimming with wicked humour, precision-timed shocks, and some of the year’s best gags… in every sense of the word.

Anchoring the anarchy is Hardy’s force-of-nature performance. Gloriously inappropriate, she is a monster every bit as memorable as the movie’s actual villain. Despite her character being unabashedly horrible, the real-life Hardy’s actual antivax flirtations make her a provocatively political lead for such an apolitical movie. Maybe the message is that COVID-deniers will reap whatever havoc they sow, although that reading seems a stretch. Savage and his Host co-writing team Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd are chiefly concerned with concocting escalating splatter encounters for Annie to navigate, arming her with an indestructible smart phone and acid tongue.

In this, the film scores a bloody bullseye. Savage presents Dashcam as a compendium of found-footage horror’s best bits. Acknowledging his ghost train aesthetic, he stages one segment in a creepy after hours fun fair, alongside other traditional horror locales. Fans will chuckle as background clues tease out the story, while cheering the foreground destruction.

As with Host (and Cloverfield, Chronicle, that “Amateur Night” story from VHS that became Siren, etc., etc.), the lo-fi visuals lend the impressively mounted SFX and make-up work a visceral authenticity. By the raucous denouement those cheering fans will be howling with delight.

In a nice touch, onscreen comments from Annie’s viewers become a Greek chorus of faux-concern, trolling, and self-aggrandisement. So, the internet then.

Time will tell if Savage can present a developed story, or if he is solely a cinema-of-attractions director. We reckon he’s got at least one more found-footage frightener in him before he needs to conjure up new terrors though.

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