After his girlfriend Rebecca leaves the state to go to college, Johnny (who looks the bass player for Pennywise) sets up a video chat system with her so that they can stay in touch. For her birthday, Johnny sends Rebecca the number of Vera Madeline, an online fortune teller. Instead of the usual mystical advice, Vera tells Rebecca that the house she’s renting a room in is haunted. The house was the site of some hinky motherflippin’ ritual murders back in the day and the spirit of the perpetrator is hungry for more victims. Now with only the miracle of dial-up internet and a backwards baseball cap on his side, Johnny has to save Rebecca from the twin dangers of a being sacrificed by malevolent spirit and ruining her credit score with a Columbia House membership!
Video chat horror films got their start way back in 1938 when Frankenstein Vs. Dracula: An America Online Exclusive was released on the world. And then nothing until The Collingswood Story (2002). Filmed on a Sony Hi-8 video camera (my weapon of choice all through the early 2000s), director Michael Costanza brought us this claustrophobic shocker that warned of the dangers of using a fifty-foot phone cord to go looking for evidence of cult activity in a spooky old house. But did we listen? Obviously not because who in the heck even knew this film existed until Cauldron Films released it?!
Apart from the use of some subtle-as-a-sledgehammer subliminal images not at all hidden in the film and some dicey sets, I quite enjoyed The Collingswood Story. It has a megaton bomb of amazing fall vibes and quite a few spooky ooky chills. I really dug the cast, the setting, and the way the story unfolds. Oh wait, I did notice one major inconsistency with this film. There are no scenes of someone furiously masturbating to a picture of Pamela Anderson that took them 45 minutes to download, so I don’t think any of the internet scenes are very realistic. Sorry to be so critical!
Bravo to Cauldron Films for bringing this little obscurity from out of what seemed like freakin’ nowhere. Due to the way it was shot and its budgetary restrictions, the film looks and sounds as good as it can, which is just fine by these old eyes and ears. As for extras, there are interviews with the director and the cast that appear to have been filmed sometime in the mid-2000s (or they’re brand new and that old Hi-8 is still kicking around). Maybe these were sourced from a previous release? There’s also an audio commentary by the director and some cool Polaroids from the making of The Collingswood Story.