Tag Archives: found footage

Creep (2014)

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Shudder just started a new series called (I want to say) The Creep Tapes, that I decided to take a look at, because why not. And then I learned it was based on a movie from ten years ago, called Creep. The show was good enough for me to say (again), why not, and here we are.

So this guy named Aaron has been hired via Craigslist by this guy named Josef, for the princely sum of one thousand dollars, to be his videographer for a day. Josef explains that he is dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and has an unborn or very young child[1] that he wants to leave a remembrance for. And that’s it, that’s the whole set up.

The only thing worth knowing from here forward is that Josef is incredibly awkward. His sense of humor is almost but not quite mean-spirited, his sense of boundaries is non-existent, he gets way too emotional with a complete stranger way too fast… it’s more or less one of those embarrassment / shame / The Office (British) style of scenarios.

….or is it?

I have a feeling this is more worth watching if you’re not spoiled, and I also have a feeling that the TV show might actually be better than the movie in some ways, mostly relating to improvement via shortened run time. All that to say: both are pretty good, if you’re okay with the premise.

[1] I forget, for the justifiable reason that these are the only two characters in the movie. Hmmm. I guess there are two and a half, but the half also isn’t the aforementioned child, so.

Host (2020)

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I wonder if there’s a useful distinction to be made between found footage movies and webcam movies. The latter is clearly a subset of the former, but in the age of Covid, there has been an explosion of the webcam footage type. The benefits are obvious: actor separation, no camera man presence, no director presence, set dressing can be done by the actors or at least prior to their presence. I’ll admit, I’m not perfectly clear on how ghostly cabinet slams and other movement based special effects are handled. Maybe by radio control?

Although, to be honest, I wasn’t even entirely sure whether I should review Host. Weighing in at under an hour, is it really distinct from some Sunday evening special TV episode? But then the choice was made at least somewhat for me by my having fought with maybe a thousand spams over the past two weeks, all in the older sections of my site where long overdue updates were needed to modernize the reviews. Since I haven’t watched any other new movies in that span, here we are.

A bunch of British friends (mostly ladies) are on a Zoom call to hold a seance with their hired guide. One or two of the characters seem regularly and visibly upset, which makes me think there was a recent death? But if this was made clear, I do not recall. What quickly[1] is made clear is that something spooky has shown up, and between the seance leader dramatically falling offline and the others not being as good at remotely performing the “nevermind, go home” ritual as they were at performing the “welcome, spirits” ritual in the first place, you know back when they also had leadership, it is only a matter of time[1] before things start to go fubar, supernaturally speaking.

Arguably, I’ve now spoiled the whole movie, but the other option, which would have been mandatory, is to spoil it in the other direction when the webcam seance resulted in nothing interesting happening at all, because that would have been some real bullshit.

[1] It’s like 56 minutes long. “Quickly” was the only option.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin

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Next of Kin dares to ask two new questions, which makes it objectively twice as important as Ghost Activity[1] was. One: what if paranormal activity, except Amish? Amish are not as spooky as children, but there’s no denying that living an 18th century lifestyle in the 21st century is a little creepy if you adjust the angle on it even slightly. And this time I’m being 100% serious: two, what if paranormal activity but with all continuity jettisoned and the whole thing is itself, not beholden to anything except found footage of jump scares and eventual terror.

Young adult, adopted with no history beyond a lady dropping her off at a hospital, finds an Amish relative via 23 and Me or whatever, and her friend decides, hey, this would be a cool documentary. Let’s go find your roots! And they do, with a conveniently good excuse to always be filming things[2]. Later, they learn that Amish are in fact creepy, as is their church in the woods, as is their spoiler stuff I won’t mention, and all of this even if they are not actually Amish at all.

I think I like the ending of this movie best of all of them except the first one.

[1] That’s not actually the correct name, but I’m leaving it as is. haha oops
[2] By my count, maybe three of the movies actually have this excuse for the whole duration, which is not the worst record.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

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Anyway, there was one more Paranormal Activity movie that I missed, prior to the current new one that doesn’t yet count as missed. So now I’m caught up, yaaay.

The Ghost Dimension dares to ask the question: what if a paranormal activity movie, but it’s a new family who moved into the prequel house, and also they find a magic camcorder that can see what has until now been left unseen? You can often tell that by the sixth movie in a series, maybe the well is running dry?

I’m being unfair, though, this was a legit entry to the series, for the following reasons: 1) they came back around to a creepy kid. This is always the way to go, so that was a great start out the gate, and this little girl oozes creepy. Hopefully because she’s a good actor, as otherwise I feel bad for her now. 2) for the first time ever, there’s a good reason to hold onto the camera even when things are completely insane. Because you can see what’s going on and use it to save yourself in a way that people in the prior movies could not[1].

Okay, that’s not a lot of reasons, fine. But it represents a correct direction for the series and I’m not sad that I bothered with this like I might have otherwise been. Now, the problems with the movie: 1) the time travel stuff does not make a lick of sense. It didn’t when they introduced it, and it does even less now. As far as I can tell it’s there only so new characters can stumble into scenes from older movies. 2) watching movies with commercials sucks. …okay, that’s not a problem with the movie per se, but it is a problem with the distribution people not selling streaming rights to the right vendors. No, I will not pay a rental fee. Ugh, get off my lawn.

[1] I mean, you can’t. It won’t help, at all. Obviously. But it’s still a good excuse!

Jeruzalem

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The first few minutes of Jeruzalem show old Super 8 footage of not quite an exorcism, being performed by a catholic priest, a rabbi, and… an imam? (it wasn’t clear) after a dead mother had returned to her home in Jerusalem, with glowing eyes and, occasionally, tattered wings. This was accompanied by knowledge gleaned from the Talmud slash Jeremiah 19 that there are three gates to hell: one in the desert, one in the ocean, and one in Jerusalem.

My copy of Jeremiah 19 doesn’t make any kind of reference to that, but if you google for the three gates to hell, it’s apparently a thing from somewhere in the bible and/or Jewish teachings. I exited the rabbit hole before I got too deep or more confused.

Anyway, this is only like the first three minutes or so? The meat of the movie is two American girls, both of whom I believe were themselves Jewish, headed on vacation to Tel Aviv. The catch is, one of them is wearing Google Glass, because this was 2015 and the outcome of that particular piece of technological archaeology was not yet known. So it definitely gives off an early movie air of “what if Cloverfield, but with facial recognition tied to Facebook profiles and navigation and cat videos, instead of, y’know, a video camera?” It almost makes sense, as they were in her prescription, so why would she take them off? Counterargument: why would it always be recording, though? Or maybe there’s some deeper than I cared to look indictment of what gets stored on those multi-petabyte server farms of Google’s. …you know, if Glass had taken off and it was a thing to worry about.

Anyway, back to the plot: the girls meet this guy on their plane out, and make friends, and he convinces them to go to Jerusalem for a few days instead of Tel Aviv, because… honestly, I missed why. Yom Kippur maybe? So they go to the old city, and visit the Wailing Wall, and explore some creepy caves under the city, and go sexy clubbing, but things are occasionally unsettling in various ways, and before you know it… well, I’ll be honest, I actually had no idea as I entered the second half what it was actually going to be about, and that was pretty dang refreshing, so I’ll stop here and say that as found footage horror goes, I ain’t mad at it.

I’m not sure it made a lick of sense, and sometimes it relied on the technology being glitchy to heighten the tension, but it was nevertheless entertaining and unpredictable, and that’s not nothing.

Blair Witch

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mv5bmji0nteymja3nv5bml5banbnxkftztgwodk5otu4ote-_v1_sy1000_cr006481000_al_Did you know that The Blair Witch Project came out seventeen years ago? That is a long time! And yet, here we are with a sequel[1]. And, uh… that’s kind of all I have? Which is bad. But the thing is, you saw the first one, right? Blair Witch is that movie, seventeen years later. Is there a documentary? Yep. Do they go into the woods? You betcha! Are there weird stick figures and creepy little piles of rocks? I think you know.

I mean, this is how you make a horror movie sequel. Same people[2], same plot. (This, I maintain, is why people didn’t like the other sequel. Different people, different plot. Also: Halloween 3.) But then they did the other thing that good horror movie sequels manage, which is to bring in more information and make things make more sense than they did before. So, long story short: if you liked the first one, you’ll like this one. If you hated the first one (which I know a lot of people did, especially people who get motion sickness), you will still hate this one. So, y’know. Check in with the 1999 version of you and see what’s up.

[1] Technically, there was also a sequel sixteen years ago, but a) a lot of people incorrectly dislike it and b) more relevantly, this sequel ignores the one from 2000, so I will too.
[2] Okay, it’s Heather’s younger brother, who always wanted to know what happened to her, but same family basically counts as same people.

Paranormal Activity 4

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So, hey, I finally saw a movie! I still have at least three more I need to see, but just breaking the dry spell is a plus. You may recall there were two previous movies in this series as well as a prequel? Well, Paranormal Activity 4 is a sequel again, and… well, there are two ways to watch it. If you like cameras filming all the things and people refusing to take seriously what they are seeing and eventually scary jumpy things happen[1] and then suddenly everyone starts to die, and especially if you like seeing just how creepy Katie Featherston can be? (Answer, as you know if you’ve seen any of these: seriously damn creepy.) If that is what you are watching for, you will like it just dandy, and are welcome to have all kinds of fun.

If, on the other hand, you are watching it because of the compelling story that has played out across the three previous movies, you will be very sad. Yes, there is creepy Aunt Katie. Yes, this is still about demonic possession as it relates to Katie’s doomed and/or creepy extended family. But really it’s about what happens to a group of innocent bystanders, with only the barest of incremental additions to the overall mythology. Maybe there will be a fifth entry to the series? But, much like the end of the second movie, I still don’t see what would be gained by making a new sequel. Demon wants baby, demon got baby. What else really is there to say?

Well, one thing. The infinite number of infrared dots that a Kinect fills a dark room with? Perfect backdrop for, er, paranormal activity.

[1] Also, there was a basically great reference to The Shining. Not enough reason to watch the movie, but entirely giggle-worthy if you do so.

Chronicle

You ever see Akira? I haven’t, but I went to see Chronicle on the strength of it completely reminding me of the version of Akira that’s in my head. That worked out pretty well for me. See, there’s this disaffected teen with a camera, and he wanders around filming everything, like disaffected teens with cameras in movies do. (Well, okay, also like skeptical husbands and best friends and film students and, okay, pretty much anyone in the last 15 years who has ever had a camera in a movie.) And he even meets a blogger chick with her own camera at a party, but before you have time to realize how tragically underused she’s going to be, even before he gets a chance to consider being into her, she starts flirting with his cousin instead.

Which doesn’t really leave a lot of conflict, just 80 minutes of emo misery, right? Well, no, but only because he and his cousin and his cousin’s class president friend find a hole in the ground that leads to a glowing macguffin that gives them all, y’know, powers. And then they start figuring out how to use their powers, and how to use their powers to change their lives. And then, you know, other things happen. Good psychology, good superheroing, good primary cast, mediocre supporting cast (with one infuriating exception), really good use of multiple cameras (considering the context), plus also it’s set in Seattle, if that has any relevance.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s a pretty good one, and considering this is February? It’s close to great after all.

Paranormal Activity 3

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Sure, the movie too, but there is something downright unsettling about silent closing credits. Of course, maybe that’s only true if the movie was unsettling first. It’s cool, though, Paranormal Activity 3 was. Remember how there was a demon afflicted family in 2006, these sisters who had boyfriends that liked to film the creepy stuff that was going on around them and they made vague references to similarly creepy things that happened to them when they were kids?

Well, that’s a fact. If anything, stuff was sufficiently creepy as to make me wonder if I should go back, watch the original two films, and try to find continuity errors, because seriously, these people lead severely fucked up lives that they maybe should have been willing to talk about a little bit more, maybe to therapists and exorcists? It wasn’t as good as either of those movies, alas, but really I’m completely a slave to the first person camera horror genre at this point, so I’ll see it no matter how bad I expect it to be or, indeed, am told it is by trustworthy people. Still, now that I have squandered any shred of credibility, I nevertheless thought this was pretty good.

[EDIT from 2021: Confirmed, this does not especially well fit the continuity of the first two movies at all. Unless you account for brainwashing, which is pretty plausible to be honest.]

Paranormal Activity

On Thursday, I had never heard of Paranormal Activity as a movie, even though it has apparently been out since 2007. On Saturday, I watched it, knowing nothing more than what I’m about to say here: spooky stuff is happening in a house, the residents set up cameras, and then bad stuff happens. Delving only slightly more, the girl has been haunted by something spooky for her whole life, and this is the latest iteration thereof.

I can’t exactly say it scared me, although there are circumstances under which it could have. For one thing, the audience would have needed to not be present. On the bright side, I traded potential fear for guaranteed amusement. There really is something awesome about listening to ripples of shock and fear spreading through 500 people at your back that brightens your day! Another fear-conducive circumstance would have required me to live in an alternate universe where The Blair Witch Project had never been made. And in some ways I would prefer that alternate universe, because this would have been far scarier than Blair Witch was when I saw that movie under the precise circumstance I describe. All that said, the movie really was pretty affecting, with slowly building tension that transformed into dread and quite a few “oh shit” moments.

I guess the best thing I can say for it is that, unlike the majority of movies I see these days, I forgot to mentally write my review as I was watching, because I really did want to see what unexplained and maybe-scary thing would happen next.