Body Rock

As I have mentioned more than once. Ms. Spenser likes horror movies. Particularly, horror without a lot of gore (no slashers), preferably with a supernatural element. Since I am the queue curator, it is my duty to pick something like this every week or so. Since this is not really my element, I make a lot of blind choices (I almost said, stabs in the dark). Body Cam (2020) is one example.

It starts on a rainy night in a deserted industrial part of town. A police car has stopped a van without license plates. The driver, a shadowy figure wearing a coat with a hood. The dash cam shows the cop trying to get it to show a license or just talk, but all it does is gesture, and the cop goes flying up out of the frame.

Then there's that dreaded "X hours/days earlier..." card. We seepolice officer Mary J. Blige coming back to work after a long suspension for punching a civilian. She is paired with a rookie, Nat Wolff. One of their first call is to find out what happened to the cop in the first scene. The car is there, but not the cop. Blige checks the dash cam, and finds it full of interference. But she does see the office go flying, and land on the hood of the car, before flying off again. They find him high up on a fence, impaled. When backup arrives, the dash cam footage is unusable, and nobody really believes her when Blige tells them what she has seen. In fact, they tell her she shouldn't have messed with the evidence.

But Blige got a clue about the person in the van - she's wearing hospital scrubs, and there's a nurse who left suddenly a little while ago, Anika Noni Rose.

We see the van stop at a convenience store, where some gangbangers are harassing the owner and filming themselves. The police see the van and head in, causing the gangbangers to freak and grab Rose. Then a hulking shadow grabs him from behind, causing him to start shooting. By the time Blige and Wolff show up, everyone is dead and Rose has slipped away. But she surreptitiously grabs one of the phones. She goes to the morgue and uses the dead guys thumb to unlock it. Once again, the footage has a lot of interference, but it shows the shadow monster.

When this started, I was afraid it was going to be about honest cops who body cams showed them doing horrible things, because demons or ghosts or something. That would have been pretty tasteless. Instead, the body cam footage was almost always unusable, except that Blige gets to see it. I don't know why she never waited to watch this stuff with a witness who could corroborate, but it's just as well. You can't really trust anyone, especially in the police. 

This was really only fair - a decent plot, some good scares and action, but nothing too exciting. M.J. Blige had some real charisma, and was very believable as a working cop, not corrupt or too idealistic. Any way, Ms. Spenser was satisfied.