My quick rating - 5.2/10. Bodycam starts off like it’s ready to punch you straight in the face and then…unfortunately spends the rest of the movie searching the cutting room floor. Looking for its momentum. That’s a shame, because the opening sequence legitimately had me, and sets up what could have been a very tense supernatural thriller.
The story kicks off when two police officers respond to a suburban house call that quickly escalates into a nightmare. Officers Jackson (Jaime M. Callica) and Bryce (Sean Rogerson) first screw-up by shooting a man and his infant child. From there, the situation only gets stranger, darker, and far more supernatural than I had expected. It’s a strong premise, and the beginning of Bodycam really leans into that effectively.
Callica and Rogerson both give reasonably solid performances as Jackson and Bryce. They feel believable enough as officers thrown into an escalating crisis, though the script doesn’t exactly make it easy for the audience to root for them. In fact, one of them becomes pretty difficult to sympathize with, right away. I thought the moral gray area could have been interesting if the film had put more focus on it, but instead, it mostly uses it as fuel to push the story into chaos.
Now I’ll admit upfront. I generally loathe the found footage genre. Shaky cameras, characters making terrible decisions, and the inevitable “why are they still filming this?” problem annoy me. Bodycam tries to sidestep that by using police body camera footage as its framing device, which is technically still found footage but at least comes with a built-in reason for the cameras to exist. In this case, the documentary-style approach actually works in keeping the suspense up.
Sadly, that promising setup is the high point of the film.
For a while, things still hold together. Even when the supernatural elements start creeping in, the movie manages to maintain some intrigue. Then the film makes a very questionable decision. It introduces a bizarre meme-looking monster that I absolutely did not need to see. Sometimes less is more, and this was definitely one of those times. If the choice is between showing a goofy creature design or letting our imagination run wild while focusing on possessed followers and unseen horrors, I’ll take imagination every time.
Once that creature shows up, Bodycam starts losing steam quickly. Add in some sequences that feel suspiciously inspired by the whole “backrooms” internet trend, and the film begins to feel less like a focused horror story and more like a grab bag of familiar found-footage tropes.
The effects are also inconsistent. Some scenes look quite good, including one moment featured in the trailer that genuinely works. But others, like a driving sequence later on, look noticeably rough and pull you right out of the experience.
To its credit, the movie does deliver a few effective scares. I thought writer/director Brandon Christensen recently had a handi-cam move marathon and realized after The Puppetman, he would give the genre a shot. At times, Bodycam almost feels like an homage to the found-footage style, tossing in a variety of familiar tricks and ideas.
Still, despite its flaws, I’ll give it this. It’s better than that Blair Witch crap. And coming from someone who usually runs screaming from found footage, that might be the nicest compliment I can give it.
https://jackmeat.com/bodycam-2026/
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