Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews
Matthew M. Bartlett
Bodycam
Director: Brandon Christensen
Writers: Brandon Christensen and Ryan Cristenden
Not to be confused with Mary J. Blige police procedural Body Cam (2020), 2026’s Bodycam is yet another found footage movie, with the wrinkle suggested in the title. Our two protagonists (maybe anti-protagonists?) are Officer Jackson (Jaime M. Callica) and Officer Bryce (Sean Rogerson). The movie jumps right in as the pair are called to investigate a possible domestic abuse call. The streets are littered with tents and homeless people, and the house is a wreck. Notably, their radios and phones fail within the confines of the house.
In short order we see occult symbols and a massive well, a mutilated dog in a bathtub, and creepy people. One of the latter is carrying a bundle and charges rather supernaturally at Officer Bryce, who shoots the man and the bundle, which turns out to be a baby. A witness to this, a blood-soaked woman, digs into her throat with a bottle.
Officer Bryce, whose wife is, of course, expecting, is desperate to erase the bodycam footage. To that end, along with the pleading Jackson, he goes to an army/navy store, apparently open 24 hours, where in the basement works a technical wizard character exclusive to movies like this, who can alter or delete footage. They play the footage. The technical wizard hears one of the creepy people say the word “Underman” and she kicks out the officers.
After fending off a barricade of street people who keep uttering the phrase “You took something from him, now he’ll take something from you”, they end up at a shelter run by Jackson’s mother, where more street people lurk, issuing the same threat. Meanwhile, Officer Bryce begins to hallucinate. Or at least that’s what the camera shows.
Ultimately, Officer Bryce shoots himself and Officer Jackson, in a very effective scene, seems to run into the house they first entered at every turn, even in the heart of the city, that same house with two lit-up windows on the second floor, until every building on the street is the house. We end with a burst of street people and a creature that may well be CGI but also could be AI, a many-armed Underman who, I can’t be sure, either wants people to descend, or to rise.
Bodycam plays out like a too-long outtake from the VHS anthology movie series. Its leads are effective, its atmosphere decently decrepit, its politics as muddled as its fictional mythology. The movie seems to want to duck accusations of using homeless addicts as villains by having Officer Jackson’s mother get mad when he calls them “tweakers.” It’s still, eh, iffy. Especially as characters in the credits have names like “Tommy the Tweaker” and “Tabitha the Tweaker.”
The last scenes in the movie, with Jackson moving about the interior of the house, look depressingly like a first-person shooter video game with a gun-wielding arm angled in from offscreen. There’s a brief but unmistakable homage to The Blair Witch Project, a denouement with more officers showing up at the house, a few people being dragged violently and quickly offscreen (de riguer in movies of late, and very much overdone), and another lunge at the screen from our AI Underman.
Bodycam is at least entertaining. Maybe it would have been better as a 20-minute VHS segment, however.
