My favorite thing about watching “bad” movies with my friends is when we accidentally find one that’s really well made. It’s such a nice surprise. Like when you expect that something will taste sour but instead get a mouthful of sweet nectar. On the surface BAD BEN looks like it should be perfect for a bad movie night. It’s very low budget, it’s made by someone who is arguably an amateur, and it’s one of the many imitators following in the footsteps of the found footage genre that The Blair Witch Project catapulted into popularity. However, I enjoyed the hell out of this. Yeah, it’s got a few rough edges, but if you’ve ever read any of my previous reviews you should know by now that I like it rough.
Quick Recap! When COVID shut down everything in early 2020, I started an online bad movie night get-together with some friends that we eventually dubbed “Bad Movie Monday”. The premise was simple: We’d torture each other every Monday with the worst trash we could find, tell a few jokes, cheer each other up, and in the process maybe discover some weird obscure cinema that we might never have seen any other way. This series of reviews will feature highlights of those night so you can all share in the fun and maybe get some ideas for your own movie night.
I always try to review movies while keeping the skills, resources, and money that the filmmakers had at their disposal firmly in mind. Because if there’s one thing that I hate doing, it’s trashing someone’s work when they did they best they could with what they had. However, at the same time, the quality of the film also kind of matters. Doing the best you can is great and all, but the film also has to have a spark of creativity and sincerity as well. Art requires imagination, not just persistence.
This is why it was so awesome to discover that director/writer/star Nigel Bach legitimately has talent. I’m not just giving this movie praise because it only cost three hundred dollars to make, which is pretty impressive in and of itself actually. No, I’m praising it because there’s plenty of entertainment to be found here, along with quite a lot of clever bits and a half decent amount of spookiness.
The story is simple enough. A man called Tom Riley buys a big fully furnished house for cheap at an auction, moves in, and then slowly discovers it’s haunted by something evil. Perfect! You don’t want to overcomplicate things with your first movie. Keep it simple. Find a genre that you like and that you think you can accomplish with the budget that you have, write a story that is fluid enough to suffer improvisation, and go with that. That’s what Bach did, and it worked really well.
TEN THOUGHTS I HAD DURING THE MOVIE:
#1 As someone who has seen his share of cheap banged-together-at-the-last-minute props in low budget stuff, I can say with all honesty that I was impressed within the first five minutes of the BAD BEN. Every prop looks real and lived in. You’d be amazed how often filmmakers skimp on this sort of stuff.
#2 The location is also excellent. It’s just an ordinary old house, but Bach shoots it in rainy or overcast days, and pitch black nights, to make it more sinister and lugubrious. He’s got a good eye.
#3 I think I also undersold how cleverly written this is. For the most part, the film authentically feels like someone’s video diary that they uploaded to YouTube or Instagram.
#4 Nigel isn’t a professional actor, so most of his acting really consists of trying to elocute his lines as clearly as possible. However, that’s fine for this sort of movie. Besides, he gives a solid performance and he’s perfectly credible as an everyman homeowner trying to make sense of the strange things happening in his new house. He’s logical, doesn’t get too stressed, and doesn’t jump to conclusions. He acts how a real person in his situation would act.
#5 Your own enjoyment of this film may vary depending on your tolerance for micro budget filmmaking and first time acting, but if you can get past that there’s much to admire here. Besides, the film is available for free on YouTube. Can’t get a better deal than that, can you?
#6 I’ve mentioned this many times in previous reviews, but editing and pacing are key in a low budget or “bad” movie. Do it wrong, and you’ll ruin the whole damn thing. Do it right, and you have achieved glorious perfection. Nigel Bach is not the most experienced of filmmakers, but he has really good instincts. He knows which scenes to include and which to cut, and he knows how to keep things moving along and keep you engaged. That counts for a lot, especially when you’re making something like this. There’s been a billion haunted house movies, and like it or not the stories are all going to star blurring into each other. There’s really no way to make it original but you can make it a crisp, chopped down, lean and mean story. Which is what Bach mostly does here. There’s a bit too much fat towards the end, but it’s a minor sin at best.
#7 Here’s another great thing about this movie. I’ve seen so many low budget movies whose set dressing is such shit that every room looks like the empty office space in the back of someone’s warehouse with a couple of cheap tables and chairs pretending to be a real room. The house in this movie looks real through and through, obviously because it’s Bach’s actual house, but still. I’m sure the filmmakers of those other movies had homes too. So there’s no reason why their movies should look like they do.
#8 The special effects in the movie are very low budget, but they have a of old school charm. They’re mostly done for real, and they mostly look convincing. That’s all you can ask.
#9 Another thing I really liked about BAD BEN is the sound design. A lot of no budget movies like this usually have terrible sound design. Either you can’t hear anything because they’re using dirt cheap microphones, or they use so much ADR that it might as well be a radio drama. Here, everything is crystal clear even though it was all recorded live on set. You just have to watch a movie like THINGS to see why I think this is worthy of praise.
#10 Around the one hour mark is where the film kind of starts to show some cracks. Bach just didn’t have the budget or skill to pull off what he was going for. He gives it the old College try, and I appreciate his dedication to patiently building atmosphere, but the movie is around 5-10 minutes too long. It starts to drag. It’s nothing fatal, but I was getting a bit antsy.
Was it actually bad?
Hell no! This was great. This is a solid little film. It’s not going to re-invent the cinematic wheel or anything, but it’s plenty good. It’s also inspiring to watch, because if Nigel Bach can make something as good as this with what he had to work with then nobody has any excuse anymore. You got a phone? Go out there and make your film! Go out right now and shoot something. Find a single striking image that you can build a movie around. I don’t know, dress up one of your friends in a top hat and a cloak and have them walk past your bedroom window at night in a sinister way. Get your little sister to stand in the woods under the full moon and wail like a banshee while holding a scary doll. Have your dad put on overalls and a flannel shirt and run screaming into the house with an axe. Then make a movie about that. If Nigel Bach can make a movie then YOU can make a movie.
