Despite my hatred for "found footage" horror films, my interest was piqued by see that this was a "found footage" film from 1989—predating ostensible genre inventor "The Blair Witch Project" by several years. It's sort of like discovering a heavy metal band from 1963.
Interestingly, this film about a family birthday party interrupted by the appearance of aliens shows that the "found footage" genre emerged fully failed from the beginning.
This earliest known example contains everything that sucks about the genre: little plot, a complete disregard for pacing in favor of dwelling for too long on irrelevant conversation between uninteresting characters (do we, as viewers, really need to spend 5 minutes watching the family say their goodbyes to each other after dinner?), difficult-to-watch low-quality camerawork with zero cinematography, muddy sound, and an all-around lack of any qualities that might make it worth spending the time to watch.
I guess "The Blair Witch Project" really was a fluke.
I will say this has one thing many "first person shooter" films don't: these people scan almost act... at least, the way they screech at each other, and the frequent numbingly dull small talk, are somewhat realistic, rather than amateurishly hammy. It actually counts for a lot. While it's still a terrible movie, it's just bad, not annoyingly bad, beyond how annoying an uninterrupted hour of other people's families ordinarily are.
And at least, at the time, they were trying something new, not watching a movie just like this and saying, "Hey, I could do that same thing!"
Those are the sole reasons I put this under "Different, At Least" and not just "Trash".
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