I Do Movies Badly: Resolution
Who’d have thought that it was a review from IMDb cluing me into how Resolution, a film that I initially wrote off as “two guys who did the best they could with what they had,” was actually a meta parody of tired horror tropes that leaned into its budget restrictions rather than tried to work around them?
I know Resolution is a story about storytelling, but I didn’t see it as parody. A parody needs to make tropes funny rather than just using them. What is the “comment” they were making about low-budget horror? Do they do anything to parody some specific films? Instead they just pile on lots of horror elements, figuring that the audience would recognize them as such, and the characters could react to them as possible elements of a story.
The characters viewing “found footage” is also used in Sinister. Both films were released in 2012, so I don’t think there was enough time for Resolution to be commenting on Sinister, rather than both happening to use a similar idea around the same time. Just as this also came out during a time when many other low budget horror films were made and it’s not clear the film is commenting on those.
What does the film say is “bad” storytelling as opposed to “good” storytelling? The lack of resolution doesn’t seem to be a characteristic of low budget horror films. I don’t know what “archetypes” you’re referring to, but there’s no logical connection between their presence and the lack of an ending. The lack of an ending instead seems tied into the unique aspect of the film: the unseen entity is focused on storytelling and none of the various endings are satisfactory.