Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Leslie Felperin

Dashcam review – Maga-loving social media monster leads pandemic horror

Pandemic-themed shock schlock … Annie Hardy plays Annie Hardy.
Pandemic-themed shock schlock … Annie Hardy plays Annie Hardy. Photograph: pr handout

Nasty, brutish and mercifully short, but occasionally mildly amusing, Dashcam represents another dollop of pandemic-themed shock schlock from writer-director Rob Savage, recently renowned for his lockdown-set horror pic Host. This time around, Savage has exchanged Host’s Zoom-chat framing device for a Discord stream, with comments and emojis scrolling up from the bottom of the screen as a fictional audience reacts to the main content. This will probably need a lot of explaining to viewers in 20 years’ time, but for now it seems very à la mode and down with the kids, as is the blurry gore-soaked violence, smutty material (get ready for lots of jokes about anal insertions) and air of cynicism.

The star of the show is Annie Hardy, a social media star apparently playing a version of her IRL self: she is an intentionally abrasive millennial Maga fan, whose usual gig is driving around Los Angeles livestreaming and improvising raps in response to suggestions from her fanbase. Unfortunately, lockdown has thinned the action on the streets, apart from the odd naked cyclist. So Annie flies over to the UK to visit her old friend and former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), who in the years since he’s seen Annie last has got less amused by her racism and refusal to conform by, for instance, wearing a mask around others. Hardy is a personification of everything that is obnoxious about the American right, but seemingly about as unkillable as a cockroach or Donald Trump’s political career judging by the way she navigates through a zombie apocalypse that starts out of nowhere.

Savage melds the conventions of found-footage horror and livestreaming effectively up to a certain point until it just starts to seem like a silly, contrived gag. Shot largely on iPhones, there’s a huge amount of shaky-cam jiggling about that may leave some viewers feeling as if they are on one of the funfair dodgem rides featured in the final act. Others may have already begun to feel nauseous at an earlier point when the closeups of a faeces-smeared anus started up. Either way, it’s not pretty.

• Dashcam is released on 3 June in cinemas, and on 6 June on digital platforms.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.