The Bay

Barry Levinson's original plan was to make a documentary detailing the terrible environmental degradation of his beloved Chesapeake Bay on America's east coast, but he decided that his message would find a wider audience in the form of a horror exploitation flick. The resulting film, The Bay, is certainly more entertaining than having to sit through yet another eco-doc, but less interesting than it might have been.

In telling his story of a coastal tourist town overtaken by a mysterious, toxic plague, the veteran director (Diner, Rain Man) takes on the found-footage horror genre with gusto, cutting together a bewildering range of imagined sources, from CCTV and video diaries, to Skype and instant messaging. The result is both convincing and headache-inducing. And if the special effects are gruesome enough, where the films falls down as horror is in the literalism of Levinson's message. Instead of the existential menace of Jaws, we get warnings about the levels of chicken shit in the water. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]