Let’s get pissy about found footage.
Tales of Found Footage is another no-budget horror film on Prime that sucks about as much as all of the other no-budget horror films on Prime. I wonder if I am trapped in some sort of Nietzschean eternal recurrence where I’m pretty sure I saw a movie that sucked as much as this one, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this one.
This is a VHS ripoff (at best). It has none of the charm or the oddly effective creep that little gem did. Instead we get what must have been shot in a single take. We have three uninspired stories, but we also have a bitchy British host bitching about the film between each story.
What I think happened is that they had these three crappy found footage shorts and decided to slap them together with the satirical host in hopes people would misread this as a satire and not a complete failure of a horror film. You might see the host as the only redeeming quality, but that is only because he doesn’t belong in the film. We get to see something outside of it, so it feels fresher than it actually is.
Our first tale follows a couple idiot teenagers who go into a haunted hotel. The set designs here are the laziest I have seen in a while. Literally no effort was given to make the hotel seem scary. The special effects are non-existent, instead we have Halloween costumes. Crappy costumes at that.
The second story wants to be the “I like you girl” from VHS, but totally sucks ass. I have nothing else to say on this one.
The third is about witches. Whatever.
Streaming services have become so clogged with this low-level shit that anyone who has a good idea, talent, or passion is going to get buried. A little bit of quality control on what is available would help greatly on these services.
The stories here are lazily written and filmed. The acting is atrocious. If this was revealed to be a junior high film, I would say they are at the level of talent expected of folks that age. Anything older and…. Well.
The worst part of the film is the terrible sound mixing. Since sound control and sound moderating are apparently unknown concepts to these filmmakers, we end up with whisper quiet dialogue followed by ear splitting shouting. Anyone listening with headphones is going to have a headache by the end of it.
This movie sucks, but what else is there to say? The found footage gravy train derailed about ten years ago, but everyone is going to keep chasing it until something new comes along for people to rip off. There is a reason why these trends disappear from the mainstream—people get tired of them. Something, anything new would make this one at least worth watching. Adding an annoying host who taunts the audience for watching a shitty movie isn’t new, nor is it compelling.
Rehashes of other works can work, but they need to be damn good. This one fails on every level. A horrible waste of time.
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