DASHCAM (2021) ought to come with a health warning about how much it'll make your blood boil
or: I wouldn't piss on this movie if it was on fire.
“Fuck you, you fucking semen demon!”
I haven’t viscerally hated a movie this much, with every fibre and subatomic particle in my body, in what feels like forever. But good god almighty, Dashcam is the kind of putridly vomitus piece of fucking shit that raises all my hackles, pushes all my buttons, and makes me wish I could get back the time I irreversibly wasted on watching it.
Intolerable, unbearable, obnoxious, illogical, stupid, hateful, irritating, exasperating, loathsome, loud, vile, repugnant, infuriating, juvenile, clumsy, clueless, unfunny… and that’s just the main character!
Though you can hardly call Annie Hardy (played by… Annie Hardy?) a “protagonist”, since she’s the worst person in the whole film, one of the worst characters in any fictional media ever made, and so lacking in any redeeming qualities, that it’s irrefutable she’s the real antagonist of the film.
Yet Dashcam refuses to do the one thing you’d expect (and also pray for any gods within earshot) to do with a main character this over-the-top abhorrently detestable, and that is FUCKING KILL THEM FOR THEIR CHARACTER’S SINS.
But nope! Sorry to spoil it for you, but you deserve to know that after director Rob Savage subjects you to a teeth-pullingly agonising hour-plus of enduring this excruciating character, he doesn’t even have the decency to reward the viewer with a satisfying kill for the one person in the entire story you desperately want to get axed by film’s end!
And, to add to the fucking temerity, after the story wraps up after about 67 mins (an overlong runtime that drags on like a punishment), you’re then subjected to nearly 10 minutes of credits, performed by Hardy as a shitty improvised rap for each one of the primary cast and crew, and by that point it’s not even like salt on the wounds, but like acid on exposed nerves!
The only positives about Dashcam are that it’s nice to see cast members from Savage’s breakout horror hit, Host, return in some small roles herein, and that the horror visuals and general vibes of the larger plot, happening around the insufferable main character we have the misfortune of being trapped with, are gory and inventive and ambiguous enough to make you wish you could see them remade in a better movie.
But as it stands, I cannot recall the last time I’ve seen a film so fundamentally kneecap itself from the jump as an immediate catastrophic failure, just because of how it chooses to frame its story, and who it chooses as our POV on the events that transpire.
The fact that the Annie Hardy of the film1 is exceptionally unlikeable is obviously the point - she’s a MAGA hat-wearing, anti-vax, anti-mask, antisocial, anti-liberal right wing troll, and Dashcam makes sure to bash you over the head with its insistence on her irredeemable assholery. But that’s all it has to say or do with her. There’s no character arc, no change from where she starts to where she ends (despite the insanity of the circumstances she goes through), no reflections on her flaws, no regrets for her mistakes, no semblance of recognisable humanity within the noxious facade of Trump-era radicalisation. And where you might imagine that the film could be making a larger point with her anti-growth, you’d be giving Dashcam far too much credit. The film is just a car crash of calamitous creative choices that snowballed into this colossal dungheap.
You’re way better off watching Joseph and Vanessa Winters’ delightful Deadstream instead, which does everything Dashcam tried (and failed) to do, but pulls it off way more successfully and entertainingly.
Dashcam, however, should have all existing copies of it thrown into the fucking sun.
Rating: ½
(A distinction I initially made because I knew nothing of the real life Annie Hardy, until I read other reviews for the film, and quickly learned that Annie Hardy is actually like this in reality, actually saying and believing the 4chan-esque bullshit she ceaselessly spouts as her barely fictionalised, name-sharing character! Which makes Dashcam somehow even worse than it already was. SERIOUSLY, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, ROB SAVAGE??????)
I'm so torn. I straight up love a really terrible horror film, but the reveal that the detestable character and the actor are basically the same person really gives me pause here.