The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

The Taking of Deborah Logan

IMDB rate: 6,4

Genre: Possession, Mockumentary

Starring: Jill Larson, Anne Ramsay, Michelle Ang

The Taking of Deborah Logan, or in short The Taking popped up on Netflix this weekend. I didn't really know what it was about but the rating on Netflix and IMDB seemed to be decent, so I gave it a watch. 

The Taking is a mockumentary about an Alzheimer patient, and it shows the progression of the illness. At first I was a bit bummed out that it was another found-footage movie, since there are so many of those already. But for a found-footage movie it started out pretty decent. 

At first the movie feels like a true documentary about Alzheimer, it shows pretty good what the disease causes and that it affects the people around them to. You've already read in my genre section that this movie is about possession, which gave a pretty interesting input at first. The character Deborah Logan (played by Jill Larson) is the Alzheimer patient and every time she has one of her 'episodes' you think that the way she behaves is because of the Alzheimer. When the movie progresses you are getting doubts though, is this really just Alzheimer or is there more going on?

The movie is a lot like Paranormal Activity, only this movie had a more interesting story going on. The Alzheimer gave a nice perspective to what was going on. It actually made you doubt if things where happening because of Alzheimer or because of the possession.

Unfortunately, about halfway through the movie becomes just another one of these typical found-footage movies. When Deborah was clearly being possessed the story became choppy and somewhat lame at points. The scary moments are pretty much all off-screen meaning we can't actually see a thing of what's happening. During these moments the camera decides to get fuzzy or something, so when something should be on screen, it's being somewhat censored. Pretty disappointing really, because the movie started off pretty good. 

I liked the dialogues in The Taking, mostly because the camera dude was sarcastic as fuck. This guy is finally someone who knows when something scary is about to happen, he knows his movies. "Of course the light's don't work", "standing still in the dark, nice..." or "Damn white people with their fucking basements and attics". It lightened up the mood a bit. The acting is decent, Jill Larson does a great job at playing the unstable Deborah. Her appearance is great as well, since she can be flattering looking at her good times, but can seem very scary as well on the characters bad times. 

The Taking of Deborah Logan started off promising, but unfortunately took the familiar way. It was scary at the beginning and it had some nice refreshing parts, it's just the ending that really bummed me out. It was standard, lame and nothing we haven't already seen before. The scary parts are never really on camera, and when they are things are shaky as hell. It's really as if someone else made this film halfway through it, everything promising became standard again and the nice build-up was just for nothing really.

If you're not a big fan of the Paranormal Activity movies this movie isn't something that you would like, since it's pretty much the same concept. But if you don't hate those movies and like a nice twist to the storyline I think you won't hate this movie. In that case, give it a try!

My rate: 5,5/10