Area 407 & The Dinosaur Project

I love dinosaurs. And you might have noticed, I love found footage. So I was quite overjoyed to find out there were two dinosaur-themed found footage movies.

It turns out that while they're both found footage and feature dinosaurs, they're very, very different films. In fact, only one of them is horror.

Area 407

Area 407 is an old school, balls in the face found fooatge film, and I love it for that. The effects are simple but effective. For one thing, it features the most convincing plane crash scene I've ever seen, better than overly glossy depictions in films like The Grey and Jurassic Park 3. The storyline is simple and, let's be honest, very predictable. But the characters are actually interesting and sympathetic, which can be rare in found footage.

Basically, it's not the most brilliantly written film out there. It's pretty mediocre. But it's a pure, unadulterated genre film and that's why I'm the found footage afficionado. It instantly has established itself in my canon as my personal favorite out of the middle of the road FF films.

The Dinosaur Project

If Found Footage were my religion, this movie would be sacrilegious  It does everything on my list that indicates a weak, ineffectual found footage movie. The POV is inconsistent and impersonal, scattered over dozens of camera angels giving the film a scope and cinematography indistinguishable from a regular film (they have an in-universe explanation in the form of countless tiny cameras attached all over, but please, this format robs found footage of its stylistic strengths.) It's also not a horror film, and while it's admirable that found footage conintues to branch out, I've yet to see a truly effective found footage film that isn't horror.

But don't count the film out yet. It may be bad as a found footage "genre film," but as a regular film it's bloody fantastic. In fact, it's the best dinosaur movie to come out since Jurassic Park. It's the classic story of explorers finding a 'lost world' of prehistoric creatures, but it also cleverly turns some of the tropes on their head. The CGi is also surprisingly very good, and I rarely like CGI.

It admirably incorporates the Mokele mbembe myth, the most famous of dinosaur crytpids. For including it at all, I'll forgive them for switching the real legend of mbembe (which looks like a sauropod dinosaur), with your classic lake monster cryptids (resembling either a plesiosaur or an icthyosaur.)


Final verdict: They're both good dinosaur films, I'd prefer both to either of Jurassic Park's sequels. Only one of them is good as a found footage film, that's Area 407. However, The Dinosaur Project is a far better film overall.

Knock Knock 2

Some overall spoilers in the way of premise, depending on how strict you are, but nothing remotely specific.

For the second time I've found a decent found footage film On Demand (the first being Home Movie). The fun thing about this one is I didn't know a lick about it, had never heard of it before. So I didn't know if the 'enemy' would be a serial killer, ghosts, monsters, aliens... I was hoping it'd be aliens... even if that was by far the least likely of the choices, and there's actually a wealthy variety of alien found footage (in fact you see alien found footage much more often than 'regular style' alien horror movies). Turned out this time it was ghosts. Not my #1 favorite of possible premises, but one that found footage does very well, and one that lends itself more convincingly than most other stories in low budget FF films.

This is basically your run of the mill low-budget found footage film, which is good because I usually like low budget found footage films much more than the major studio ones. Not a hipster thing, it's just that the low budget ones tend to be more realistic and more effective as found footage. The high budget ones often (though not always, of course) use inexplicable multiple camera angles which render the found footage format as essentially a gimmick, and they craft complex storylines which stretch credulity too far from what works on found footage's primal, innate sensibility. Found footage is a simple format, and having a low budget often leads filmmakers to err on the side of simplicity, which makes the end result better.

Knock Knock 2 is by no stretch a great film, but it's competent. On the scale, it's not as good as The Wicksboro Incident, but much better than Strawberry Estates and Eyes In the Dark. Worthy of a nice nighttime watch for fans of found footage. Thankfully it's not just your average haunted house film, which has been done to death and done to perfection, from Ghostwatch to Paranormal Activity and the multitude of clones in its wake. Although it does get stuck in some familiar territory near the end, the good ole' trapped in a haunted location bit (Grave Encounters, Strawberry Estates).

The first hour of the film is excellent. The initial premise was very cool and uncommon. Instead of just visiting one urban legend, on Devil's Night (the night before Halloween), a group of friends is touring Hollywood's various haunted locations. It was so fluid that I wouldn't be especially surprised if they were just creepy on creepy-looking locales without actually having permission.

When they get to the last location, they decide to take a closer look. The location was very creepy, and for a while this was a good setup. Similar to the exceptional use of shade in Wicksboro Incident, the myriad of lights (jittery flashlights clashing against the light of the camera), made shadows dance all around my dark room, which was genuinely unnerving, and uniquely interactive.

Unfortunately the movie starts to wind down right at the moment when it should be picking up. The final scares aren't very scary and it starts to get boring at the end. But for the excellent portions before it, I was still glad I watched it. Certainly not a film that is going to convince non-fans to love found footage, but for genre fans you'd do well to go for this before resorting to what The Asylum puts out.

For the record, the original Knock Knock doesn't seem to have the slightest thing in common with Knock Knock 2. It wasn't written or created by the same people, it's about a serial killer instead of ghosts, and it's not found footage!