SCREAMBOX Exclusive found footage film Project MKHEXE will be revealed on April 29. An aspiring filmmaker returns home after his younger brother’s suicide, only to discover his brother’s obsession with a malevolent conspiracy theory that threatens to destroy reality.

I never get tired of Found Footage horror, guys. So I’m glad we have services like SCREAMBOX that will keep kicking new offerings in that field our way.

This newest such movie is Project MKHEXE, which is pronounced as M-K-Hex, not M-K-H-X. I definitely, based on the title, assumed this to be a film about a diabolical computer program, but… not so much! Project MKHEXE is actually about Tim, an older brother who recently lost his sibling to an apparent suicide. Tim does not buy it, however, and after initially filming his brother’s wake, he keeps the camera rolling as his starts investigating his brother’s passing.

What he finds is that Sean–that younger brother–had spent the previous several months tied up in researching a conspiracy theory known as, you guessed it, Project MKHEXE. Sean’s sanity and stability waned as he went further down the MKHEXE rabbit hole. With the mystery being behind his little brother’s demise, will the same fate await Tim? Or maybe something even worse?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ The movie is well edited, with good splicing of scenes and cutting back and forth between discoveries and the “real world”. There’s a lot of jumping around, and it’s all put together pretty well. Reality is spliced with video imagery and television programs and staticky cut-aways that create a sense of fear and tension. The audio is adjusted properly based on what we are seeing and what that scenery is supposed to disturb inside of us. I appreciate any movie that’s well structured on the technical end of things!

And so Project MKHEXE is one of those well done movies where you can tell there is real talent behind the lens of the camera. The director of the film, Gerald Robert Waddell, has a defined eye and ear for filmmaking, and he really knows how to put together his work, especially something like this that is dealing with so many moving parts.

+ The first act in particular is appropriately creepy, and it really stands out. After the fairly innocuous horror moving opening where we meet some characters and see the basic interactions and emotions–the kind of stuff that establishes everything we need to care enough to get scared later on–Project MKHEXE kicks everything into gear and moves into more terrifying territory.

The use of the spliced imagery and the ability to cut in more dire quick flashes of static and disturbing noise really elicits a feeling of dread. Having watched this in relatively low light and with headphones on, it actually managed to get under my skin early on. There is a genuine creepiness factor at play here, and everyone hit the mark, especially in the early running.

– It drags on for a bit and could definitely stand to have been cut down by about fifteen minutes in the second act. After succeeding so hard at creating atmosphere and tension in the first act, the second does grind to somewhat of a halt as Tim and Sean’s friend Nicole meet each other and start the investigative process of finding out about Project MKHEXE and what actually ended Sean’s life.

It’s a shame because the film actually has good forward momentum early on, but it squanders that as it goes into exposition mode at times. There’s just a bit too much down time or talking to other characters whose relevance is questionable, and some random things happen where Tim starts doubting the conspiracy theory he has uncovered. We get conflict between him and Nicole and a separate conflict between him and his parents, and frankly, the movie did not need any of that. It felt like the screenwriters going beat-by-beat in a “How to craft a movie” lesson rather than doing what the story could actually have called for.

– It’s got a pretty predictable ending. When you are halfway through the flick, you get a pretty good idea of how it’s going to end. There are a few twists and turns along the way–some work; some REALLY don’t–but ultimately, you start realizing you’ve seen this before and it doesn’t have any new ideas to toss your way.

I think that’s what got to me the most, is that as the film moved on, I started thinking, “Oh, this reminds me of The Ring / The Exorcist / Paranormal Activity / Etc”. There’s little wrong with paying homage to the classics, but aspects of this feel wholesale borrowed from those works, and it created a third act where I felt like I knew what was coming when.

OVERALL

Project MKHEXE will definitely leave you feeling creeped out and bothered by what you have seen, especially in the early going. It’s a shame that the first act is so superior to what follows, but I will credit the opening salvo with being extremely well made. Waddell and his team definitely have the bones of high caliber filmmakers, it’s just a shame that the screenplay lets them down in some areas. Still, I overall liked this more than I didn’t, so we will edge it into Good territory.