The daughter of a woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s diseases allows a documentary crew to capture her mother’s battle to help with the medical bills. The filmmakers are initially charmed by Deborah Logan (Jill Larson), an attractive, cheery subject. Soon enough, the signs of Deborah’s mental decline surface. Those symptoms start diverging from what the crew expected from an Alzheimer’s patient, including spasms of violence that put them all in jeopardy. Is Deborah truly sick, or is something else preying on her?***/// PAL REGION 4///***
F**N
Five Stars
Excellently creepy!
T**Y
RIGHT AS RAIN
The film starts out as a doctorate study of an Alzheimer's patient and seemed very realistic, Having not read anything about the film, I thought that was what I was going to see, until I caught the early clues of the paintings (before he showed me) and Deborah talking to herself. When the film changed into a hand-held horror film I still felt a little awkward watching a non-serious film on a serious subject...but I got over it.Yes the film was going along great and then it happened. the same thing that happens in all of these type of films which now passes for entertainment: Let's shoot in the dark/flashlight with a jerky camera and people shouting and screaming. Want to make it good? Pay the electric bill and mount the camera. I understand they invented this thing called a tripod.It is a good movie if you can handle the flashlight screaming and not being able to watch the film near the end. I can't.Guide: F-bomb. No sex. Nudity (Jill Larson aka Opal Cortlandt)
A**R
Documenting the effects of Alzheimer’s on her mother, Deborah ...
Documenting the effects of Alzheimer’s on her mother, Deborah (Jill Larson), Sarah (Anne Ramsay) learns that the deterioration of her health is much more than what the doctors had diagnosed. An interesting series of events that turns something real into something horrific.With a focal point of something as poignant as Alzheimer’s, the films choice to abandon any development between the relationship of the illness and possession seems somewhat absent. Not only are we introduced to the demonic side within the first 20 minutes but the link between the two situations is quickly severed in favour for a clichéd story of possession.Apart from an extremely creepy climax, ‘The Taking…’ is your generic found footage possession film which has been making its rounds within the industry for years. While Adam Rotinel has tried to infuse something fresh into the film by lending a real world situation with that of the supernatural, the execution is a tried and tested formula.Larson manages to hold into any Blair-isms as her ‘illness’ takes over to a dormant existence of her former self become more and more of a monster as the film progresses. While the development is fast, from the glimpses we catch of normal Deborah, her transition is believable but restricted from the use of the found footage format. ‘…Deborah Logan’ holds some genuinely hair raising moments with one scene in particular sending shivers down the spine as her family find Deborah naked at a piano, but despite a steady pace of chills, it lacks the oomph that other found footage films have managed to offer.In honesty, is this a fault in the film or our tiredness of the low budget way of storytelling? This is a question that the jury is out on but what ‘The Taking…’ has to offer is nothing we haven’t seen before and its marketing on the use of an illness such as Alzheimer’s could have been the pivot of all that followed but instead uses it as a trigger only to fire a blank.
E**A
Yawn.
More 'found footage' rubbish and more silly 'magical' detail.
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