(USA, 113 min.)
Written and directed by Serge Bronstein
Starring: Nick Uzarski, Brisa Freitas, Suziey Block, Hans Hernke
The police of Riverside, California, received reports of a strange
incident on the night of June 16th, 2012. The calls led them to a
bizarre crime scene at a small suburban home. Several bodies remained in what
appeared to be evidence of a satanic ritual. The house, which was leased by
four college students, was rigged with close circuit cameras and contained an
archive of over 600 hours of video footage. The Riverside PD have condensed the
home video and CCTV footage and released it to the public in hopes that it will
offer clues to fresh eyes.
The footage begins with a shot from a handheld camera. Nick (Nick Uzarski) jokes with his friend, Darren (Hans Henke), as he films their walk to a class on South American history. Their professor (Ted Ferguson) offers a lecture on the idiosyncrasies of Aztec culture. The dead were gatekeepers of the ruins, Professor Clark explains with an appropriate sense of things to come.
The haunted ruin turns out to be the same house shown in the
news footage that opens the film. (Where else does death wait but in the
suburbs?) The house, which the friends take on as a new lease, seems too good
to be true with its big pool, cosy furnishings, and cheap rent. There’s only
one catch to the house: the owner prohibits any touching of the fruit in the
garden.
Darren’s girlfriend, Liz (Suziey Block), decides to play bad
and sneak a lemon from the trees to garnish the friends’ poolside drinks with
some forbidden fruit. Prompted by Liz’s fruit hunting, the friends plant a
lemon tree. Whilst planting, Nick and Darren uncover a strange box buried in
the backyard. It’s a mythic looking box, etched with hieroglyphs and adorned
with a skull.
In the vein of Paranormal
Activity, The Aztec Box reveals
the found footage of a strange event. Things go bump in the night before the
friends dig up the Aztec box, but its removal from the ground brings more
strange noises, disruptions, and eerie events to the quiet neighborhood. There’s
a tad of timely mythology to the box’s appearance, too, since Professor Clark
explains that the markings on the box note it as an altar for sacrificial
offerings. The box champions the spirit of Chalmecatl, an Aztec god of
the underworld, who might not be the best guest to invite into one’s house
circa 2012. It’s the end of the world for some of the friends as the spirit of
the deity haunts the house and claims their lives.
The found footage ruse works to the good fortune of the
investigators, since Nick and Darren are were film students. They rigged
the house with cameras as part of an assignment for their television class,
which asked them to make a reality TV show by filming their daily lives. Much
of the footage is like an episode of Big
Brother: nothing really happens as they friends sit, talk, and have the
occasional squabble. The girls lie in bikinis by the pool; the boys drink beer
and goof off. Likewise, the restricted view of the mounted cameras keeps most
of the strange incidents outside the frame. We hear noises or watch the friends
talk about what happened, but the found footage shows little. How this all
helps the investigation is unclear, but the police presumably have a motive for
including such slow footage in their search for an explanation.
Others incidents in the archive make less sense. Why don’t
the students just sell the box if it’s rare and priceless? Why does Nick leave
for class at 11 pm on the night of the fateful crime? Why would investigators
release such footage to the public?
The strange circumstances of The Aztec Box should appeal to indie horror. If you got a chill by watching
the recordings in Paranormal Activity,
the eerie mysticism of The Aztec Box is
worth exploring. The Aztec Box might even
be more at home in the screening rooms of fans of the leader of contemporary
found footage horror flicks, The Blair
Witch Project. Like Blair Witch, the
footage from the evidence file of The
Aztec Box looks more at the victims and tries to let the viewer understand
what night have happened. The Aztec Box
is a slow study, but this cold case digs up a rare find as it builds character and plot to draw the audience into its
climactic crime, rather than pop-out surprises and gory details. Some things
are best left sealed in an evidence box.
Writer/director Serge Bronstein and his cast of mostly
unknown actors let the form of the filmmaking be our guide. What purpose does
the Aztec box hold, besides curiosity and a curse, as the friends make it the
inadvertent object of their school project? Like the pointless meanderings of
reality television, this box has no real point besides to corrupt and condemn.
The irony of Nick and Darren’s assignment is that the friends are worth more
dead than they are alive. There’s no point in watching four people lounging
around a house, but it’s worth observing them like a voyeuristic fly-on-wall if
one knows they’re approaching a grisly death. If only the contestants of Survivor—or, better yet, Dancing with the Stars—could dig up an
Aztec box and unleash an evil spirit into the banality of prime-time TV!
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
For more information on The
Aztec Box, or to help solve the case, please visit www.aztecbox.com.
