Directed by Brian Paulin
WARNING: This movie contains extreme levels of gore and violence. I’m not kidding, it gets nuts.
Starting with week 2, I’m introducing a new weekend tradition, the shocking Saturdays and Sundays! Here, I’ll break with the overall theme and talk about movies that are shocking or extreme, but don’t really fit into any of the other categories. A lot of these movies push the boundaries of good taste, so I’ll mark off exactly why they’re included in this category to warn anyone curious to search for them. All that out of the way, let’s talk about Cryptic Plasm, an underseen body horror found/partial footage movie that deserves more attention.
Cryptic Plasm follows a cryptozoologist and amateur filmmaker, David Gates, who tries to break into the competitive world of paranormal investigation television shows. After striking a deal with a sleazy producer, David heads out with a videographer, Brian O’Reilly, and investigates a series of bizarre and varied happenings, ranging from a bigfoot hunt to an investigation into a town whose residents mysteriously disappeared. As these investigations continue wearing on our two heroes, more questions than answers arise, and their safety is no longer guaranteed. What starts as a simple investigation evolves into conspiracies, plots, and cosmic horror.
I’ll get this out of the way early on; yes, this is a low budget movie. It’s rough around the edges, not all of the performances are A-Tier, and the dialogue can be a little ehh. But really, none of that even matters. The two main points in the movie’s favor are its story and its effects, and they far outweigh any issues that the rest of the film has. As far as the story goes, I really appreciated how well the plot progression played out, with the stakes growing steadily as the atmosphere built up and revealed a bizarre world that I would love to see more exploration of in a sequel. There’s a particular tone this movie nails that I can’t even put into words beyond saying that it’s kind of like that X-Files feeling that there’s this big deeper world out there that we’re only scratching the surface of, but everything we learn just gets scarier and scarier. Lovecraftian in a way, I suppose?
What really sets this movie apart though are the visual effects, they’re almost all practical and ‘DIY’ in nature, so they look kind of rough. In some movies that would be a bad thing, but the unpolished nature of the effects actually works here, it’s very ‘throwback to 80s style’ stuff, and there’s a huge variety of monsters and such that you see, even if its just a brief glimpse of something for a second or two, which is good attention to detail. You can tell that this movie was made because the director, who also appears as the cinematographer character as well as the VFX designer, loves practical effects and wanted to make a movie showcasing everything he thought was cool. You can tell this guy absolutely loves this stuff, and once you get through the rest of the movie, you’re rewarded with the most insane climax I have ever seen. That is not hyperbole. If you watch that ending and aren’t simultaneously disgusted, impressed, and enraptured, then I don’t think you’re being honest.
I love the energy and effects work in Cryptic Plasm so much that its flaws don’t bother me. If you turn this on and say, “hey, what are you talking about, this looks like shit”, please give it a chance. It looks weird, it’s designed to look weird, and it has an amazing payoff. If you like body horror or practical effects work, this is a must see. Available on Tubi!
