Dash Cam

Directed by Rob Savage, Dash Cam follows a popular livestream figure (Annie Hardy’s Annie Hardy) as she arrives in London during the pandemic and is eventually besieged by unexpectedly vicious forces. Filmmaker Savage, working from a script written with Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd, delivers a relentlessly erratic found-footage effort that suffers from virtually all the problems one associates with the genre, including (and especially) shaky camerawork that renders much of the movie’s happenings incomprehensible, and there’s little doubt, certainly, that Dash Cam‘s less-than-enthralling atmosphere is compounded by Hardy’s almost impressively obnoxious turn as the hateful, unlikable protagonist. It’s clear, however, that the somewhat intolerable bent of the picture’s opening half hour eventually gives way to a comparatively enthralling midsection and second half, as Savage has infused this portion of the proceedings with a handful of agreeably (and appreciatively) over-the-top images and interludes that prove fairly difficult to resist – which, when coupled with a fairly satisfying climactic stretch, ultimately does cement Dash Cam‘s place as a thoroughly erratic yet periodically engaging horror endeavor. (And it’s worth noting, too, that the movie boasts one of the more memorable closing-credits sequences to come around in quite some time.)

**1/2 out of ****