The Conspiracy
"Eyes Wide Shut" filmed as "The Blair Witch Project", except less.
Not the worst first-person shooter I've ever seen, not absolutely execrable like many, but without much more justification for existing than most of those movies.
Latest ""Found Footage" crap" Articles
The Conspiracy
Spree
My favorite thing: a "horror movie" about a social media "influencer", shown entirely through phone screen views and security cameras. Psychotic influencer and rideshare driver (another thing we never need another horror movie about) kills passengers in hopes of views.
Weird one, though: a lot of famous faces, including that likeable guy from "Stranger Things" with the rectangular face, Mischa Barton, SNL's Sasheer Zamata and Mikey Day. Decently well-made for what it is. And rectangular-face-guy, as the psycho, does such a convincing job of being a shallow, annoying "influencer" that he's totally believable. The annoyingness is real!
This is like Hollywood's idea of "twisted enough to be cool"—hits all the numbers and hits them well, yet, is fake and shallow enough to fail to satisfy, and doesn't go far enough to actually be shocking. It's like the whole movie is in ironic scare quotes. Which may be the point.…
Devil’s Pass
Starts off like "The Blair Witch Project" meets the Dyatlov Pass Incident, before taking a hard sci-fi turn in the last act, after it's too late. Not terrible, but, meh. Also briefly mentions the Philadelphia Experiment, which, eh, not as creative is the writer probably thought it was, two cool conspiracy theories somehow add up to less than just one. Directed by Renny Harlin, known for such B fare as "Nightmare On Elm Street 4: Dream Warriors", "Die Hard 2: Die Harder", and "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane", but who's been at this long enough that he ought to aim higher. Actually probably on the better end of "found footage" stuff in that it's not total crap, but, dunno. Wouldn't go out of my way to see it, for sure.
Recalculating
Four youtube documentarians set out to make an amatueur rip off of "The Blair Witch Project" and fail at even that. This movie contains all the most boring "first-person shooter" found footage horror cliches, and nothing else.
The Decedent
Found-footage crap about a gorgeous mortician who works on the body of serial killer and is possessed by the entity that made him kill and spends the rest of the movie killing whoever shows up, as seen exclusivey through the funeral home's security cameras and the odd number of body cams that everyone in this movie seems to wear for some reason. Actually has one notable gore scene where she slowly enbalms a living person. Might have been a decent exploitation flick, as exploitation flicks go... if they had just bothered to hire a cameraman.
The McPherson Tape (aka “Alien Abduction”)
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.
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Hangman (2015)
Pointlessly "found footage" account of a gorgeous family being harangued by intruders in their house after returning from a vacation to find it broken into.
At this point these lazy directors have given up on even having a narrative reason to use first-person-shooter perspective... this one is shown entirely through cutting between the house's security cameras and webcams, of which there appear to be an unusual number, for absolutely no explicable reason, except that they didn't want to pay a cameraman or use any cinematography.
The few outdoor scenes are shown from the stalker's cell phone camera, which he helpfully keeps running and trained on the action, even while he's stabbing someone.
I'm ready to coin a new hashtag: #FFFU. Found Footage, Fuck You.
Turned it off, except to fast-forward through it twice looking for the scene with Amy Smart.
Stars Jeremy Sisto.
The Changing Of Ben Moore
All the worst first-person shooter "found footage" horror cliches, wrapped around a nonsensical story about a man who whose face digitally distorts and he starts killing people when he sleepwalks, because, movie. Shot entirely in one house. Essentially, "Paranormal Activity" with even worse actors.
I wish people who made these first-person shooters understood that just because you don't have a cameraman doesn't mean you can also dispense with pacing, acting, and having a story.
Disappointing to see such a bad movie so full of Canadian accents. I guess it's the exception that proves the rule. Maybe Canada will kick this filmmaker out.
Fawn
They've got to stop making zero-budget first-person-shooter "found footage" crap about groups of 20-year-olds investigating some bullshit.
The Nothing
I don't know what this movie is about because the first two minutes opened with the most egregious, clichéd first-person-shooter camerawork I've ever seen and I turned it off.
Project MKHEXE
This slightly-better-than-it-should-be Lovecraftian horror mockumentary is about a filmmaker investigating his brother's suicide after months of raving about a secret government mind control project, "MKHEXE". The runtime is almost two hours and somehow it manages to hold up, and the ordinarily annoying first-person-shooter horror trope is dialed down far enough that I didn't even really notice it until about 2/3 of the way through. That, the long run time, and an egregious number of video effects (why do so many supernatural phenomena resemble VHS glitching?) are all the hallmarks of movies I dislike, and yet, it kind of held my interest all the way through.
Interesting, it's one of those movies that goes on longer than it should, blowing past several points where most movies would have, maybe unfulfillingly, ended. In this case it's a good choice. It sees the story through.
Not that I'd recommend it. I wouldn't…
Black Daruma
This piece of video—I have a hard time calling it a movie—lowers the low-effort first person shooter "found footage" conceit to a lower depth than I've seen before, by not only discarding the "found" aspect that explains why we're even seeing the film, but discarding the "filmed" found-footage idea entirely.
This series of events—I have a hard time calling it a story—center around a man who has bought a "daruma", a Japanese good luck doll, and the entire movie is filmed, through an annoying fish-eye lens the entire time, from the doll's perspective. Diegetically, the doll doesn't contain a camera, nor is it possessed, nor alive in any way, but for some reason the entire movie is filmed from the doll's perspective. This results in a few annoying conceits, such as the doll always needing to be turned to face anything the filmmaker wants us to see, as well as…
Unsheltered
If I tell you five college students shelter from a hurricane in an abandoned junkyard and are hunted down by the most thinly-drawn villain in all of horror movie history in an incredibly slow-moving captivity flick, it would be true, but unfortunately, it makes this terribly-written mess of a movie sound much more interesting than it is.
Aside from spending an entire hour going absolutely nowhere, this schizophrenic film can't decide what it wants to be... it starts as a first-person shooter, becomes an ordinary horror movie, interspersed with a procedural as later media interviews about the crime are randomly cut in, then tries to morph into a neo-noir crime thriller of some sort, as late in the movie some sort of plot twist involving some sort of dark web media show or some fucking thing is suddenly introduced in a tedious expository scene of two new characters people…
The Encounter (2016)
First-person shooter, "aliens chasing people" through the woods subgenera. (Woods where literally every single person who enters them is always filming, apparently.) Yawn.
Murmur
A bunch of social media influencers...
You don't really need to know more about that plot than that, do you? It's another horror movie about social media influencers, which has been categorically proven to be the lamest thing ever to make a horror movie about.
But, to finish.... they go into the woods and play a VR game, that, I dunno, it turns out to be real, or something? The whole thing is for people who were raised thinking watching someone play a video game is entertaining. Not for me.
Starts with the apparently now de rigeur first-person shooter convention of spending like a damn hour showing them goofing around and not advancing the plot in any way.
#MissingCouple
A fairly dreadful first-person shooter involving all the very worst tropes of the genre: long stretches of people just living their lives, lead characters are inane and annoying social media "influencers", the ever-present people still filming while they run for their lives (of course), and showing "scary" things without even ever bothering so much as an attempt to explain what is actually happening or why.
A young "influencer" couple buys remote land in the south to live off the land. Pretty soon they find bullets buried where they planted their garden, cameras pick up mysterious black-clad figures who prowl around the house and the property, shine floodlights at them, burn photos of them, and chase them into the woods. And that's it. I found myself thinking something I've never thought before: "Why don't they just get a gun?" Trail cameras reveal the figures move with supernatural speed. What are…
Interlaced
Ok, here's another movie that I kind of liked that I'm 100% positive everybody else will hate. In fact, for about the first half, I really liked it, but it kind of blew it.
A young boy, maybe 10 or 12, wants to face his fears and goes camping in the woods where his younger sister disappeared two years earlier. Sitting in his tent, he starts to hear weird things.
And for the first half, that's the whole movie. A kid hiding in a tent with weird noises outside. And, you know what? It was sort of creepy. It built a mood and played effectively off my own fear of the dark. (Have I ever mentioned my phobia? Well, I'm not exactly afraid of the dark, it's a little wierder than that, but close enough.) I have in incredibly hard time being in darkened woods, and I especially…
The Final Project
These people take the"no cameraman"ethic of"found footage"films even further, to"no editor". This appears to be a group of banal college students with no acting experience at all who went to an empty house and improvised a horror movie (albeit one without any horror), then taped all the footage they shot together and called it done. There are interminable, pointless passages of them talking to their professors in class, sitting in the car playing"Never Have I Ever", uneventfully exploring the house and grounds, all shot with a total lack of any kind of cinematic or even sound recording quality that makes the previous recordholder for"worst first-person shooter"I'd ever seen look like Citizen Kane in comparison. No plot, no attempt to build tension, until finally, over an hour into the movie, people's cameras suddenly do the deaddrop one by one for no explained reason and everybody starts running through the house and woods yelling each other's names. Basically, it's like a bunch of students saw"The Blair Witch Project"and said,"Hey, we could do that!", but they couldn't.
JeruZalem
Google Glass™️ commercial disguised as a first-person shooter, as two students on vacation in Jerusalem run from the beginning of the apocalypse, which apparently consists entirely of zombies attacking, and living people turning into winged demons. I guess the filmmakers were concerned that people are so addicted to pop-up notifications, they wouldn't sit through a whole movie unless it contained them. Maybe this appeals to the sort of people who think that if you're running from zombies and your Google Glass™️ starts unexpectedly blasting music into your ears, the thing to do is spend the next five minutes yelling"Glass™️, music off! Glass™️, music off!"over and over, instead of just /taking the damn glasses off/.
C.A.M. (Contagious Aggressive Mutations)
Supposedly a first-person shooter about the spread of a new pandemic that turns people into zombies (I know, where do they come up with such original ideas?) but I think it might actually just be a 90 minute recording of a video game.
The Possession Of Michael King
another very-slightly-better-than-average first person shooter. Widower bent on proving the supernatural doesn't exist invites in a demon to show that it doesn't work. Spoiler: turns out to be a mistake. Pretty intense performance by the lead actor showing his gradual decline into violent lunacy, but would have been better without the conceit. Don't we have enough of these movies already? The trick just isn't that good, especially by the time you realize a demon probably wouldn't have had such sustained interest in continuing to film himself, and from multiple angles, no less.
The Jokesters
Is it just me, or are first-person shooters getting even worse? Here, an intolerable"Jackass"-style YouTube film crew (great, another first-person shooter AND anpther horror movie about social media) goes to convince one of their members, who is on his honeymoon at, just because there aren't enough cliches, a cabin in the woods. Pranks appearing to go awry are revealed to be actually pranks themselves, until one decides to actually start murdering the others. Don't worry, I didn't spoil it, it's nowhere near as cool as the idea sounds. Add in the usual lousy improv acting, way too many scenes of boring daily life before the action begins, cameras that magically start and stop with the states of consciousness of the people being films, etc.
A Stranger In The Woods
A first person shooter that falls into the common 1PS trap of way too much exposition before anything interesting happens, and stretches it out so that takes up 4/5 of the movie, as a film student goes out to interview a reclusive old man at his remote house, with long over-the-shoulder shots of the tediously uninteresting interview scenes in which nothing happens and the student's words are barely audible, and then, spends the last 1/5 just plain not making any sense at all.
The Taking Of Deborah Logan
Documentary crew filming a woman's decline due to alzheimers discovers supernatural elements and things get worse from there. Soon becomes as tedious to watch as any first-person-shooter, which is a shame, because due to strong acting performances it's a little better than most.
Underground [2023]
AVOID. Dreadful first-person shooter spends the from 30 minutes showing girls partying. By 35 minutes they've taken a shortcut through a tunnel and one fell in a hole, but 45 minutes is way too late for the plot to start.
Nyctophobia
another dreadful first-person shooter that looks like someone had a spare weekend so they decided to make a movie on their iphone with their friends. Nothing happens for 25 minutes, and then all the lights go out, and it's like an hour and a half of people running around a darkened house shouting at each other. That's it. Monsters are heard outside and never seen. Nonstop nauseatingly shaky cellphone-shot video never sits still long enough to see what's going on. Seems like they made it up as they went along. What Hath The Blair Witch Project Wrought?
Moth
Absolutely dreadfully boring first person shooter. Two people spend half the movie driving around doing nothing, then they spend half the movie running through the woods and arguing. And that's really it. They talk and yell and run and nothing else happens. It's not even"found footage horror"any more. They might as well make a found footage movie of paint drying.
Incantation
Well-shot but impossible-to-follow Korean horror from the "the more horror cliches we stuff into it, the scarier it will be" school. And, a first-person shooter, to make it worse, which halfway through abandons any pretense of a reason for people to always be carrying cameras. Actually seems well-shot and well-acted, with intense cinematography and scary individual scenes, so maybe in Korean it's good despite all that. But with corny English overdubs and a narrative style somewhere between nonlinear and nonexistent, it's just a mess.
The Houses October Built 2
Half a very lazy documentary about novelty haunted house attractions, grafted onto half an execrable first-person shooter with every single failing a FPS could have. I guess they didn't have enough to make a full lazy documentary or a full lousy horror movie. Twice. BTW, memo to filmmakers: The Pacific coast is extremely recognizable. You can't shoot Kitsap County for North Carolina. Especially the beaches. Totally different.
V/H/S Viral
Installment #3, which a much bigger special effects budget and largely used well.
Most notable for the inclusion of the bizarre "Parallel Monsters", about a scientist who opens a doorway to a monstrous mirror dimension and agrees to swap places with his parallel self for 15 minutes, probably one of my favorite horror shorts that I've seen.
I actually kind thought this one was consistent and slightly better than the other two, which of course means the critics all panned it hardest of the three. Not sure what's wrong with people.
I still wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but would personally rewatch "Parallel Monsters" every now and again just because it's so damn weird.
It also marks the first-person-shooter style finally jumping the shark completely, as we see footage that could never be found (like a camera eaten by a monster showing…