The Bay

* spoilers *A news team led by an inexperienced reporter named Donna went to Claridge, Maryland to report on the 4th of July festivities. All seemed to be going well with a crab eating contest, dunk booths, parades, and the like. Then people start to get sick in droves until the majority of the city is infected with a mysterious disease. The Bay is a found footage film that compiles news coverage, personal videos, facetime conversations, surveillance footage, hospital documentation, conversations with the CDC, and oceanographer's video report to create its narrative. Donna in the present (three years after the events of the film) comments over the footage she took along with all the other compiled videos to get the full picture of what happened. It took three years to get this footage out there because it was confiscated by the governement until an anonymous hacker group released it online.Underneath the prestige and success of the idyllic looking town Claridge is a seedy underbelly of sacrificing the environment for financial benefit. The most lucrative businesses in the town are the chicken industry, restaurants, and tourism. A large chicken farm dumps over 5 million pounds of chicken waste into the bay each year doing untold damage. The water is full of bacteria plus all the pills people take every day which then is desalinate (but not filtered) and given back to the townspeople. Although people have protested the pollution, the drive of the mayor, good old American capitalism, and tradition keep those opposing voices to a minimum.The real trouble starts when thirty people exhibit extensive boils over large parts of their bodies. Dead people are found disemboweled with tongues missing that are assumed to be murder victims. Things are still generally normal while these people suffer. The mayor condemns any reports of toxic water as fearmongering and stresses personal responsibility for safety. The public call in to a radio show with huge amounts of outlandish theories from biological warfare to vaccines. The makeup effects make the rashes and boils look absolutely disgusting and lend a sinister tinge to all the lighthearted celebrations of the town and its use of water. It's crazy, but realistic to see how so much can go wrong without any real response or effort to protect people. As the film goes on, more and more people get sick with increasingly terrible symptoms.The film follows a few people intermittently through the story which include the oceanographers studying the polluted water, a teenage girl facetiming at the local ER, the doctor in the ER, Donna the reporter, the mayor of the town, cops patrolling the neighborhood, and an oblivious couple with their baby coming to visit family. Donna is the main person connecting all this together, but I found her annoying especially when she cared more about her naivete showing in the video over the devastation. My favorite was the doctor in the ER who worked with the CDC to find out the cause of the outbreak. He works tirelessly interviewing, treating, and operating on people plus giving all the information to the CDC despite the people's growing panic and pain in the ER plus the risk of infection for himself. He prompts a girl facetiming with her friend to record what is happening in order to garner more evidence.The culprit turns out to be a mutated type of parasitic isopod paired with a bacterial infection. The natural type of these parasites target fish, get in through the gills, remove the tongue, and then replace it with their bodies. Other than that, it doesn't do any other harm besides sometimes causing them to be underweight. These mutated ones attack humans, fill their stomachs with larva, burst out of their bodies, and remove and replace their tongues. This is the perfect movie to watch for the 4th of July considering the current political climate. Those in power are actively shutting down the EPA and other restrictions that protect wildlife and the environment in favor of businesses, drilling, and jobs in defunct energy sources. This film is frightening because it shows an extreme version of what could happen if we refuse to take a good look at what is being done to the environment. The only flaw of the film is the annoying reporter Donna and the terrible CGI effects, usually with fast-moving isopods. The Bay takes a water creature feature similar to Jaws and adds an additional aspect that makes all of the water, not just the ocean, dangerous.

THE BAY is a modestly effective ecological found-footage horror film, shot in the style of a documentary. It's not terribly scary, it can be clumsy and obvious, and there are some plot holes that would have been much smaller had it not been set in the age of the internet; but I would give it fairly good marks for efficiency, effort, and ingenuity in utilizing its modest budget. If it fails to be very scary by my lights, it is more than occasionally disturbing, which ain't a bad consolation prize.THE BAY is about an outbreak of parasitism which occurs on a festival weekend on a rather isolated island in Maryland in the Chesapeake Bay. While the townsfolk are gearing up to celebrate, disgusting parasites, blown up to large proportions by all the sewage, chemicals and what-not being pumped into the Bay, begin to manifest in the population. As chaos and panic spread, the government seals off the island and the corrupt local mayor does his best to obfuscate the truth of what is happening. Scientists and doctors do their best to identify and contain the outbreak, but as the bodies pile up and the system breaks down, the main goal of those who remain is simply survival. None of them are extraordinary folk: some acquatic scientists, an ER doctor, a few couples, a baby reporter who is really just an intern, some small-town cops. Thankfully there are no beefcake former SEALS with degrees in epidemiology or "scientists" who look like Playboy models. Just salt of the earth people whose world crashes down in a single day.As I said above, this movie combines both ecological horror, which can be very preachy and obvious, with the rather tired vehicle of "found footage" or docu-horror...but it does so in a fairly effective way. The idea here is that this town's survival depends on chicken farming, a de-salinization planet, and fishing, all of which combine to create a perfect storm of chemical poisons which threatens, ironically, to annihilate the town via the aquatic super-parasites, which burrow through their hosts, consume their tongues and finally drop out of their mouths in a disgusting, vomitous form of birth. Most of the movie's horror is found in these scenes, but they are more deftly handled and less gratuitous than one might expect, especially one sequence handled entirely via police audio. The characters don't exactly leap off the screen with blistering performances, but the actors do their jobs efficiently, and the editing is not obnoxious. I don't buy the idea of the post-disaster cover-up, and the movie would have been much more effective had it been set in the 70s, but you can't have everything in a low-budget flick like this. To put it another way, for a B-movie, there is considerable craft here, a quality I admire.All in all I think this is a decent horror movie which kind of takes an environmental riff on the played-out Zombie Apocalypse trope and does it more than reasonably well. As a guy who grew up in Maryland, I can also say that the pollution in the Bay, one of the most beautiful places on earth, continues to be a disgrace despite some earnest efforts to clean it up, and the idea that we will shortly pay a steep price for this sort of stupidity is much less of a movie conceit than any of us want to believe.

An intelligent and effective eco-horror using a found-footage approach, documenting the outbreak of a plague of aggressive parasites at Chesapeake Bay during a national American Holiday.It's a low-budget effort, but the format is well-handled and is all the more unsettling in that it has a basis in real ecological facts; the multiple story-lines linked by a reporter's investigative narrative helps keep the viewer's interest and conveniently explains the situations as they develop.It's a neat twist on a familiar formula, in some ways reminiscent of “Jaws”; not a bad little film of it`s kind.The DVD release offers a decent 16:9 aspect ratio picture that is sharp and clear (considering the nature of the sources) on a large-screen TV; subtitles in English are available but you may need to adjust your screen-settings to view them properly. The only extras are an 8 minute “behind the scenes” with director Barry Levinson and a trailer.

This film reminds me of the Blair Witch film. If you enjoyed the Blair Witch you will enjoy this film. I have watched this film twice so far and the second time was much better to watch. The DVD arrived in great condition and I do recommend it and great value for money.

The Bay was one of those bits of cinema that I was never really fussed about. Set in the 'ever popular' style of 'found footage', but with something a little bit new to bring to the table. The scope seems much larger than most found footage films (with the obvious exception of Cloverfield), and the characters seem to have more depth. There is defiantly an element stolen (or respectful borrowed) from The Tunnel (which, by the way, is probably the best found footage horror film around!), in that the film is portrayed as a documentary, with survivors etc, talking though the events, interspersed with 'news clips' etc. Much research went into this film and you can tell. It is a very believable concept and it is well executed. Worth a watch, but I would recommend Blu-Ray rather than standard DVD as the resolution is important to really 'see everything' and not miss too much in all of the chaos that ensues!

I had low expectations when I started watching this but I was pleasantly surprised. It is another found footage film which the market is saturated in but this didn't have that horrible running around with the camera stuff going on. It's clips brought together from different sources to tell the story which I liked. It's doesn't have the best acting but for an easy watch horror it was enjoyable.

The seller is great, the 3 stars r just for the film. I didn't really enjoy the film, but I thought I'd try it as others said it's awesome. If I was to rate the seller, it'd be 5 stars on condition of the item & that it arrived on time