Review by
Ren Zelen
Directed by: Jud Cremata
Starring: Troy Leigh-Ann Johnson, Isabel May, Odessa A’zion, Brooke Sorenson, Dakota Baccelli, Jessica Sarah Flaum, Blake Robbins,
Valorie Hubbard
Writer/director Jud Cremata has created his low-budget horror
Let’s Scare Julie with the significant gimmick that it was
shot in one, continuous, 85-minute take - a challenging undertaking for
any filmmaker.
The story begins with a night-time prank being played on 17-year-old Emma
(Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson) by her cousin Taylor (Isabel May)
by way of introduction to her group of teen girlfriends. The joke turns
out to be not so funny as it brings on an attack of Emma’s asthma.
Their timing is also particularly insensitive as Emma and her 7-year-old
sister Lilly (Dakota Baccelli) are staying with cousin Taylor and
their uncle Vince (Blake Robbins) because they were recently
orphaned by the sudden death of their father.
It turns out that Taylor has invited her three friends - Madison (Odessa A’Zion), Jess (Brooke Sorenson) and Paige (Jessica Sarah Flaum) -
for a secret sleepover, and a rather obnoxious bunch they turn out to be.
After their initial prank, the girls continue to be noisy, unpleasant and
intrusive, asking insensitive questions, invading Emma’s space and
rummaging through her belongings, prompting many apologies from Cousin
Taylor who struggles to keep the shrieking harpies quiet in the hope of
not waking her father, who has passed out drunk on a sofa downstairs.
It seems that these bored teen girls have a penchant for playing tasteless
pranks and think little of waving a gun around in front of Emma’s
7-year-old sister Lilly.
After an overlong introductory scene of the girls talking over each other
and larking about, we finally get to the crux of the plot. Every sleepover
demands a spooky story and Taylor shares one about her former neighbour
across the street, Miss Durer (Valorie Hubbard), who was rumoured
to have dabbled in the occult. Apparently, nobody ever saw her save for
one boy who disappeared shortly after the macabre-looking woman came out
on her porch and graced him with a threatening stare.
A man and his daughter, called Julie, have recently moved into the house
across the street that Miss Durer once inhabited. Ever in search of the
next victim to play a trick on, it does not take too long before the girl
gang devises an ‘amusing’ plan which involves donning some Purge-like
masks as disguises and terrorising Julie. No matter that she is shy, and a
perfect stranger to them all.
Emma refuses to take part in the prank itself but reveals that she knows
where a key to the house across the street is hidden, conveniently in the
safekeeping of her uncle. So, in an effort to be ‘accepted’ she agrees to
fetch it for the girls from under the nose of her drunkenly unconscious
uncle. Emma stays indoors with her little sister Lilly while the rest of
the teens, eager to scare someone, don their luminous masks and head over
to Julie’s house.
We never see what happens across the street, but only two of the girls
return. First a terrified Jess appears, jibbering something about her
friend falling ‘through the floor’. She is followed by Madison (the most
obnoxious character) who apparently has no idea why the others have
vanished or why Jess should be frightened. The situation is further
exacerbated when they find that 7-year-old Lilly has also disappeared from
her bedroom.
Madison concludes that Emma’s cousin Taylor has not returned simply
because she has gone directly to the airport to pick up her mother (rather
an anti-climax) but she insists on going back to the other house to see
what has happened to Paige and to see if little Lilly is there too. Will
she too now become a victim of the house?
Let’s Scare Julie relies on its continuous one-take approach
to create moments of tension and also to allow its young cast to improvise
much of their interaction. To give them credit, Johnson, May, A'zion,
Sorenson and Flaum try to rise to the occasion and play off one another
fairly realistically, creating a naturalistic flow to the proceedings and
conjuring up some authentically chaotic situations.
However, with a lack of character development they still come across as a
rather noisy bunch of ‘mean girls’, and one doesn’t much care about what
happens to them, but I guess that is par for the course in teen horrors.
There is a last-ditch attempt to add some depth by indicating a romantic
attraction between two of the girls, but this seems forced because, aside
from a previous off-hand comment, there is little to support this
development apart from the scene where the generally inconsiderate Madison
displays a heroic side to impress her love object. The most sympathetic
relationship in Let’s Scare Julie remains the sisterly bond
between Johnson’s Emma and Baccelli’s Lilly.
Though the approach of shooting a haunted-house horror without cuts or
interruption creates some claustrophobia for the viewer, ultimately,
Let’s Scare Julie succeeds in creating little more than a
vague evocation of anxiety. Even at a mere 83 minutes, some scenes still
tend to drag, with most of the time taken up with the girls messing about
or wandering around the rooms of their own darkened house.
What takes place in the house across the street is left entirely to our
own imagination. That would not necessarily be a bad thing, as some of the
most effective horror movies are those that play upon the imagination of
the viewer. However, here the ‘offscreen horrors’ don’t quite pay off as
our imaginations are not really given enough material to work with.
After a prolonged, tense build-up, Let's Scare Julie doesn’t
quite produce the terrifying payoff we might expect - the action in the
final minutes simply doesn’t live up to the buildup and the film fizzles
to its close like a damp firework.
Let's Scare Julie is on Shudder UK
now.