JeruZalem (2015)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2015
	Director: Doron Paz, Yoav Paz
	Actors: Yael Grobglas, Yon Tumarkin, Danielle Jadelyn
	Country: IL
	Genre: Horror
	Conditions of visioning: 30.01.2016, Cinema du CASINO, GIFFF2016, Official Selection
Synopsis: Two friends take on a trip from the USA to Jerusalem, when strange events start to occur throughout the city.
Review: This movie was hastily compared to World War Z because of the location and the capital Z in the title, but in fact it reminds me much more of Cloverfield (missing a review on this blog, to be corrected soon). Indeed it belongs to the found-footage category, i.e. all the images we see are shot like if they were by the protagonists in the story. In other such movies the director always have to find justifications for why people keep on filming, but in JeruZalem they had the clever idea to equip the heroin with Smart Glasses so that everything we will see is filmed from that single point of view. This simplifies the story and is actually not as redundant as one could thing (because of the single camera angle), but the drawback is that you can get annoyed by this character after spending so much time very close to it! Sometimes the movie feels like a showcase for the capabilities offered by such technological wonder: facial recognition, connection to Facebook, texting with Whatsapp, browsing Wikipedia, Skype video chats, navigation... you name it. It almost feels like too much advertisement. This might be the biggest production ever for Israel and this shows in the visual quality: it does look like a big American production (including the visual effects), with the nice added value of the beautiful setting in the city of Jerusalem. Like in Cloverfield I liked the slow start and introduction of those young characters, until when things start to go banana. Unfortunately I found that towards the end, this interesting big production with a local touch turns into a zombie movie like we have seen too many, as if there had been a lack of ideas towards the end and a will to uselessly prolong the cave scene. That's too bad because the opening of the gates of hell (not really a spoiler) was a good topic, reminding me in a totally different genre of Scott Stewart's Legion.
Rating: 6 /10