JeruZalem Review | Road Rash Reviews

4 stars for this apocalyptic found footage film.

JeruZalem is written and directed by Doron and Yoav Paz, a.k.a. The PAZ Brothers (Phobidilia).

Set against the backdrop of modern day Jerusalem, the potential for a story is enormous and for the most part they took advantage of that fact.

“…There are three gates to hell. One in the desert, one in the ocean, and one in Jerusalem…”

The story begins with our lead, Sarah Pullman (Danielle Jadelyn – Awake, The Conductor) receiving a gift from her father. The gift is in readiness for her upcoming trip to Israel with her best friend Rachel (Yael Grobglas – Jane The Virgin) which takes the form of a pair of “Smart Glasses”, which then provide the footage for the rest of the film.

The glasses are a very impressive piece of kit. They continuously film whatever you are seeing, they can take photos, read e-mails, open links, identify landmarks, operate as a sat nav and best of all they do face recognition on whoever you are looking at and show you their facebook account (conveniently, they only do this the first time you see them, otherwise I could imagine that getting pretty tedious).

This is how they first meet Kevin (Yon Tumarkin – Hatsuya), an anthropologist with whom they immediately hit it off on the plane. On his advice they decide to change their plans and instead of heading straight for Tel Aviv for sunshine and beaches they elect to go to Jerusalem with Kevin first to spend Yom Kippur there (both girls are Jewish).

They find a decent youth hostel to stay in and Rachel is immediately taken with Omar (Tom Graziani – A Place In Heaven) an employee who proceeds to show the three of them a good time.

Kevin has other reasons to be there however, he has his suspicions about the city and has been investigating old vatican tapes. It soon becomes apparent that he may well have dragged them into the middle of something none of them are equipped to deal with.

JeruZalem is a very enjoyable film. The use of the Smart Glasses is a very good idea and makes the footage far more interesting. It also gives a better feel of being part of the action. It is quite slow to get going but I rather enjoyed that, pottering around exploring the city and chilling out in the hotel made the action, when it did start, seem that much more extreme.

The only thing that I felt let it down a little bit was the seriously flawed decision making processes displayed by Sarah and Rachel. I sincerely hope that young female American tourists are not quite so keen to hop into bed with the first bloke who tells them they are pretty, although exasperating as it is, in a way their naivete added to the charm of the film.