New Trailer: The River

A new found footage TV show?? With involvement from the great OREN PELI? And the venerable Steven Spielberg?? You can damn well bet that Found Footage Aficionado is excited!



According to the reputable Uncle Creepy over at Dread Central, the respective masterminds of Paranormal Activity 1 and 2 (Oren Peli and Micheal Perry), drafted the series together, which indicates it has a high possibility of being extremely fucking awesome.

The premise is a bit close to Cannibal Holocaust for my comfort, but I suspect there will be no unconscionable human atrocities (or cannibals) in this TV show. (Can you imagine a basic US network station showing Cannibal Holocaust? I think the Earth would implode). As entirely unlikely and preposterous as it would be, I'm crossing my fingers that our protagonists will run into Mokele M'bembe on their trip!

Eyes in the Dark (2010)

Eyes in the Dark

Rating: 1 star out of 5.


Notice: This entry contains no spoilers.

Overview: Fun, spooky, and well executed. But definitely not for anyone awaiting a serious masterpiece, it's just a fun film with plastic monsters.

Under the umbrella of paranormal occurrences, there are three main categories. Ghost activity and alien encounters each incur a variety of found footage adaptations. Cryptozoology, by and large, does not (40-some 20 minute incarnations in Lost Tapes aside). And while Eyes in the Dark is far from the perfect found footage cryptid masterpiece I hope to someday find (what Paranormal Activity is to the ghost persuasion), it's refreshing to see a take on this subject.

A group of college kids go out into a remote woodsy area to party, it's the set-up you've seen a million times. But who doesn't love scantily clad young people running for their lives? And you've probably seen it mostly in slasher and monster movies, although it occasionally has a presence in found footage as well (Evil Things springs to mind).

Nothing about the plot is original, but the execution may be. The ole' ancient unearthed moster slash & dash rampage is only occasionally committed to found footage. I love a good monster flick and this one is done somewhat well. The obligatory meandering early segments are fun to watch, and the monster scenes are attacked with gusto by the filmmakers. Some aspects might seem cheesy to most, but it actually freaked me out quite a bit.

Like Strawberry Estates, they attempt to accomplish some scenes they simply can't manage on their budget, instead of opting for modesty like Wicksboro Incident. Don't get me wrong, I adore cheesy effects. In absolute seriousness, I'll take a decent rubber suit over most CGI -- Carnosaur's rubber dinos look more menacing than anything Spielberg has at his disposal. But even I have my limits. When you can't afford even the rubber suit, and you have to settle for a plastic novelty on a stick, that's when it's time to employ the 'less is more' approach to filmmaking. Keeping the monsters off-screen for the whole movie would have turned this goofy movie into a scary one.

It's a genuine shame that so many low-budget filmmakers fail to grasp elementary subtlety. Because you really, truly can make a five star, A+ found footage film without even a Paranormal Activity sized budget. But it takes a careful eye and a devout adherence to nuance. Hopefully as films like Paranormal Activity continue to garner millions of dollars, under the radar filmmakers will take a closer look at how much you can do when you leave the action to our imagination and keep things as simple as possible.

In the end, there's a reason Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project give people nightmares, while Eyes in the Dark and Strawberry Estates flitter in obscurity. There's more to found footage than a shaky camera and meandering improvised dialogue. But I'm not sure Eyes in the Dark was ever intended to be a masterpiece. It succeeds considerably at being what it is: a fun, spooky movie about some kids on the edge of the woods. The found footage aspects lends decent scares to where there otherwise would have been none, and it admirably translates the found footage archetype into the 'just for fun thrasher' subcategory.