Director: Rob Savage
Starring: Annie Hardy
Country of Origin: USA, Canada, UK
When a lead character is simultaneously foul mouthed, obnoxious, and deeply irritating it can be considered something of a triumph as well as an unwanted distraction.
Unfortunately, right-wing live streamer Annie is immediately unlikable.
The horror is not so much in the found footage style genre but being forced to listen to her purposefully offensive raps for unnecessarily long segments of Dashcam.
Forget the concept of the final girl, this is a girl you hope is killed off from the moment she appears on screen.
Set during the Covid pandemic she drives around aimlessly stringing words together about genitalia and other highbrow topics prompted by the live comments of her infantile online fanbase.
We can see all the crude suggestions on the bottom left-hand side of the screen as if viewing the stream in real time. It is another annoyance in a film which portrays a nauseatingly extreme anti-vax Republican stereotype, albeit one with a potty mouth.
Although Annie’s channel is neither particularly entertaining nor funny, she somehow maintains an audience before a seemingly impromptu trip to London to visit an old band-mate.
Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel) once toured together with Annie – as a t-shirt with numerous Glasgow gigs, among others in Britain, attests – but along with his girlfriend quickly grows tired of her loud, imbecilic rants to camera.
The deafening antihero accompanies her old friend on his daily rounds as a food delivery driver and breaks into an apoplectic rage when asked to wear a mask by an exasperated restaurant owner.
In an act of teenage rebellion, the MAGA hat wearing lead steals her friend’s car – before being kicked out his house – and stops at a random restaurant.
Instead of a delivery the mysterious Scottish owner instead gives Annie a bundle of cash to transport a sickly-looking woman to an unknown location.
From a relative amble in suburban streets everything is ramped up to the manic speed of a Formula 1 race.
Buckets of blood are spilled as the phone is ripped from the dash and shaken around like a puppy with a new toy as director Savage succumbs to every horror cliche in a preposterously frantic finale.
Deserted woods, blurred figures in the middle of the road, an isolated house, an abandoned fairground, a suicide cult, and creatures with blood lust feature in a bamboozling onslaught which scrambles the senses.
Farcical, inexplicable, and unexplainable, Annie manipulates it all for more views as she gives sarcastic live commentary as flesh is sliced and heads roll.
Savage deserves at least some credit for giving such a repulsive character the central part in an innovative, heavily stylized stab at something different.
The interactive angle at least captures part of the zeitgeist; a generation addicted to watching streams and short videos which can at any time propel the most unlikely individuals into online stars.
Annie’s channel struggles for viewers and in some respects could pass for a genuine stream – the more blood and gore the number count dramatically increases – another on the bandwagon trying to win the lottery to online fame.
It is ambitious but flawed, Savage throws everything into the mix and nothing sticks. Instead of following one thread he sticks several together and the result is an incoherent, jumbled mess of ideas.
Annie Hardy, a real-life musician with a history of expletive ridden songs, is excellent as the tiresome centre of Dashcam. It is quite an accomplishment to make a character quite so repugnant that few if anyone watching will have even a shred of sympathy for her ridiculous plight.
In an innovative ending which makes everything before it look like nightmarish nonsense, she conjures up as many foul-mouthed rhymes as she can about the cast and crew as they are flashed on screen. Eventually she gets fed up – although not as jaded as anyone who sits through her pathetic antics (which is a credit to her exaggerated acting).
The only upside is the mercifully short running time – just 67 minutes without the end credits – which was probably set to match the average attention span of the target market demographic.
Stephen Kasiewicz 