Jacob Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		2.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		2.0

Jacob Blu-ray Movie Review

Should you be on Team Jacob?

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater April 16, 2013

With the advent of inexpensive digital cameras, it's gotten progressively easier to scrape together the resources to make an independent horror film. Making a good indie horror movie, however, is another thing entirely; equipment will always be less important than telling a good story in an interesting way. And the problem with low-budget horror—just like its big studio counterpart—is that good stories are hard to come by. The genre has become known for the self-referential regurgitation of its own tropes and conventions, and so the challenge for filmmakers is to either find clever ways to do precisely that or else blaze entirely new territory. I think most would agree that there's far too much recycling in horror and not nearly enough forge-ahead innovation.

Shot on the cheap with off-the-shelf pro-sumer cameras, writer/director/actor Larry Wade Carrell's Deep South slasher Jacob is admirable for its D.I.Y., let's get out there and make something gumption. You can tell he and his crew had fun shooting it, and from the mostly practical effects to the hammy acting, the film does have a kind of humble, look what we made charm. The problem is that every single idea, theme, plot turn, and character has been poached from other, better horror movies. Unoriginality may be de rigueur in the genre, but there's nothing new in Jacob.

The title character—played by Dylan Horne—is a six-foot, 400-pound Faulknerian man-child, a bald-headed sixteen-year-old Texan brute in saggy overalls. On the mental competency scale, he's somewhere between Benjy from The Sound and the Fury and Lennie from Of Mice and Men, but he's got the anger management issues and psycho-killer tendencies of a conspicuously similar Jacob—the dim-witted hulk from that awful 2009 WWE slasher, See No Evil. He hears voices. He kills cats for fun. He glowers and plods and looks like a walking horror movie cliche.

After a present-day prologue establishing the spooky "legend" of Jacob Kale—"He was real. He was real, alright."—we jump back to rural Melvin Falls, 1979, where the beefy teen lives with his beloved kid sister, Sissy (Grace Powell), their harried mom, Edith (Krystn Caldwell), and her abusive alcoholic boyfriend, Otis (Larry Wade Carrell), the town's good old boy rabble-rouser. When the story opens, Otis is raging drunk, screaming and beating on Edith in their squatty house, prompting a fed-up neighbor to finally call the police. When Sheriff Andy (Leo D. Wheeler) and Deputy Billy (also Larry Wade Carrell)—Otis' more respectable brother—arrive, Jacob has intervened in the fight and has Otis pinned to the wall, about to rip his head off. The cops can't calm him down, but he finally breaks his stranglehold at the insistence of Sissy, who assures him that everything is okay. She's the lone stabilizing influence in his life, so—without spoiling anything—you know something's going to happen to her to make him flip out and go on a violent killing spree.

Before we can get to that, however, we have to suffer through a lot of filler in the guise of character development, with overly long scenes of Otis getting hammered at the local dive bar and Edith trying to hide her black eye from her boss at the greasy spoon diner where she works as a waiter. Carrell labors to give us a stereotypical vision of a small Southern town, and his tone sits awkwardly between serious and comedic parody. He's not bad in his dual roles of Otis and Billy—it actually took me a few scenes to realize they're played by the same person—but most of the other actors' performances are amateurish, or at least off. And that includes The Terminator's Michael Biehn, who has a small part in flashbacks as Jacob's father, who went crazy after finding a Necronomicon-like book in a haunted farmhouse he unexpectedly inherited. Yes, not simply content to borrow from Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style slashers, the film also indulges in supernatural kookiness, like the obligatory old witchy woman with black teeth and cataracted eyes, who shows up occasionally in her tattered white nightgown to cackle and mutter portents. We've seen this all before.

It takes Jacob a good fifty minutes to finally get going, but I'll give the film this—when the bloodshed inevitably begins, there are at least a few fun low-budget horror movie kills, all accomplished with practical effects. A ripped-off arm. A stomped-on jugular. A torso machete'd in half. The sheriff rounds up a posse of village folk to find the homicidal monster—there's more than a bit of Frankenstein in here—and Jacob turns the tables, hunting down his hunters one by one. While the quality of gore is admirable for such a low-budget movie, the film is never remotely tense, let alone scary, partially because Jacob himself is a boring antagonist with no personality or menacing on-screen presence. We vaguely pity him, but that's about it. Is he rampaging out of vengeance? Is he afflicted by the same curse that made his father insane? Not that it really matters, but the film lacks the focus to be able to say with any certainty. There's simultaneously too much and not enough going on here, if that makes sense. You can respect Jacob for its indie ingenuity, but story-wise, it's as empty-headed as its lumbering killer.

Jacob Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I wasn't able to find any specifics online, but watching the behind-the-scenes footage, it looks like Jacob was shot using a small Canon DSLR— maybe the 7D?—and a slightly larger HD video camera. The fact that a feature film can now be made with these relatively inexpensive tools is fantastic, but the picture quality just doesn't compare to, say, the Arri Alexa, or the Red camera, or 35mm. The movie's 1080p/AVC encode—framed to 2.35:1— displays many of the issues you often see with lower-level digital cameras. Aliasing and moire frequently affect tight parallel lines and patters. Banding and serious macroblocking are often noticeable, particular in out-of-focus backgrounds. Noise goes from completely absent in bright daylight scenes— giving the image a plasticky, texture-less sheen—to harsh and buzzing during the darker exteriors. Considering the type of equipment on which the movie was shot, most of this is unavoidable. While the overall level of clarity is decidedly soft, particularly in wider shots, closeups do at least reveal some fine facial and clothing detail. Color has been somewhat aggressively graded, typically resulting in a yellowish cast—sometimes with a strange green tint in the shadows—but I don't doubt Kino-Lorber's Blu-ray is entirely true to source. This is one of those it is what it is encodes.

Jacob Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The disc includes two audio options, the default lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track and a 2.0 stereo fold-down. Do yourself a favor and immediately switch over to the functional stereo mix before you start the movie. Why? Because the multi-channel track is really poorly designed. The most aurally offensive aspect of the mix is that the dialogue emerges near equally from all of the main speakers, not just the front channels. So, when you're watching a scene and a character is in front of you on the screen, you inexplicable hear his or her voice in the space behind your head. This isn't just a rare occurrence; it's like this for the entire film. It's disorienting and distracting, so much so that it's not worth describing the rest of the 5.1 mix in detail. Go with the 2.0 track, so you at least get a fairly balanced, listenable presentation. It's obvious that a lot of the audio was added in post—even a lot of the lines sound dubbed—but again, it is what it is. The highlight here is the spooky score from Iain Kelso, which belongs in a better film. Do note that there are no subtitle options.

Jacob Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentaries: The disc includes two tracks, the first with the director and the cinematographer, and the second with a few random actors, including the girl who plays Sissy.
• The Journey of Jacob: Behind the Scenes (HD, 1:02:28): An incredibly long making-of documentary with the usual assortment of interviews and on-set footage.
• Deleted and Extended Scenes (HD, 6:54): With optional commentary from the director.
• From Storyboard to Screen (HD, 3:59): A montage of storyboard comparisons to the final film.
• Interview at Montreal Comic-Con (HD, 8:55): An interview with the director at the film's Canadian premiere.
• Screen Tests (HD, 5:01): Watch Grace Powell and Krystn Caldwell practice one of their scenes.
• Pre-Production Pitch Trailer (HD, 2:43): A proof-of-concept trailer.
• Teaser Trailer (HD, 1:15)

Jacob Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Getting an independent movie financed and finished is an accomplishment alone, so I hate to be too hard on Jacob, which was clearly made with a love for the horror genre and a playful do-it-yourself spirit. Unfortunately, the film just doesn't really work—the story is routine, the acting is off, and there's a distinct lack of tension and surprise. Low-budget slasher fans may want to give it a go for the three or four moderately entertaining kill scenes —which were all done the old-school practical way—but more casual genre fans should probably pass. Kino's Blu-ray release is true to the digitally-shot film's sometimes problematic source material, but considering the movie was made with tiny DSLRs, it looks surprisingly decent.