Found Footage Movies?

Ever since the Blair Witch grossed $250 milllion in 1999 from a measly budget of $20,000, this decadent style of filmmaking called “Found Footage” has seen its star rise and overpower the millions of hapless movie goers who apparently can’t think for shit.

What’s even funnier are the producers who see the ridiculous Return on Investment of this kind of project, and go ahead and think they can strike it big and make millions just by spending thousands. It’s a kind of defeatist mentality, to want to spend dirt bottom to produce gold, meaning that your production will suck, with trash actors, no music score, and special effects a highschooler could produce in his backyard. But apparently, people actually think they can do it again, and that’s why we keep getting junk like Paranormal Activity, Chronicle and even Cloverfield. Laughably, Cloverfield was a big budget film... and only grossed $170M which is less than the original Blair Witch!  

What some supposedly smart producers fail to realize is that the reason Blair Witch did so well, was because it insidiously duped people into believing it was real, and it was that word of mouth that got people to watch it. There are actually dumbasses out there who thought it was real footage! The marketing campaign that led to Blair Witch’s success was nothing short of flat out lying, but hey you do what you can to make a buck. That’s why no other found footage film has succeeded at grossing as much as Blair Witch did, not even juggernaut of found footage films, Cloverfield, which had a budget of $25M.

But so the Found Footage dyansty begins. That kind of trick won’t work again, though, people have seen it once and unless you have a population of stupid sheep (oh wait...), it won’t work again. Thankfully, we seem to be a much more intelligent legion of sheep as truthfully, it hasn’t been replicated again, although the damage has been done and movies like this still keep cropping up.

Why do I hate this format of film so much? Because it’s pretentious, illogical, and downright defeatist. It’s pretentious because it tries to pass itself off as “artsy” or what not... and I bang my head on the pavement  each time I see such a movie because, apparently, it works! For some unfathomable reason, people actually think it’s “fresh” and “innovative” and interesting... when all I see is a poorly shot shaky piece of crap footage with no internal consistency.

What do I mean by a lack of internal consistency? It’s illogical: these films all work on the premise that there is some omni-present camera man actually taking all the footage. This works in many situations, but only the ones where it makes sense to have someone actually filming. There are scenes where a monster is running after you, and you are seriously still pointing the camera at it?! Cloverfield was guilty of this. Or how about scenes in Paranormal Activity where your goddamn wife is having an emotional breakdown and crying her eyes out, and all you’re doing is film her with a stupid look on your face (I just assume the stupid look – because you’d have to be thick as a rock to not put the camera down and hug your wife and comfort her). Some of these movies try to get creative to get around this limitation like Chronicle did, which came up with the excuse that the guy was a camera freak and with his new found telekenetic powers, kept his camera on the entire time filming automatically with his telekenisis!

Seriously, if you’re going to go through all that trouble why not just film it the normal way!? But film makers won’t do that, because they want to be “different” and “fresh” and “innovative” in the way that the stupid mecahnic of found footage works.  Frankly, Chronicle went overboard with its wannabe creativity by even introducing reporter footage from a helicopter and CCTV footage from nearby public cameras, jumping even further into the realm of illogical internal inconsistency in the name of pretentious creativity, but hey what do I know, they’re the film makers and the public is actually enjoying their movies, right? I mean they’re still making money off the movie-going sheep (Chronicle grossed about $120M) so if the public wants trash, they can just keep giving them trash.

Anyway, enough of that. I bring this up today because I just watched one of the cult films of 2010, a little-known film called Troll Hunter. I was hearing tons of positive reviews about this film, and trolls sounded interesting, so I went off and grabbed a copy off bit torrent.

Imagine my shock when I opened it to a disclaimer, “The footage in this film was delivered blah blah” uughghhhh oh my god another goddam Found Footage film. Well, I spent the better part of the last hour grabbing it so I might as well watch it.

Troll Hunter is inherently flawed because of its found footage format. It suffers more than most from internal inconsistency, which is such a shame because the subject matter and mythology was actually pretty interesting.

The main problem with Troll Hunter stems from its premise. Trolls are a national secret, and the government hires people to keep it that way. This is the reason why nobody knows about trolls to this very day. The Troll Hunter, the titular character of the movie, is a lone wolf hired by the government to kill trolls who go out of their territory, so as to keep all of this under wraps.  Here begins the central issue with this movie: so if they’re trying to keep it secret, why is Mr. Troll Hunter letting a gang of college students film him?!  Ostensibly it’s because he’s dissatisfied with his low-paying, high-danger job with no perks and benefits, not even night differential (must suck to be a Troll Hunter).

But if that were the case, why doesn’t he simply quit? If it’s that bad, there has to be better jobs out there that don’t risk life and limb, and yet here he goes doing the same old shit day in and day out. I mean, there’s a limit to stupidity, right?  But I guess that doesn’t matter to a genre as internally inconsistent as all found footage movies are.  The stupidity doesn’t stop there. Okay, so let’s say as viewers we can suspend our disbelief and we buy that the Troll Hunter really is that stupid.

But then,  in a twist of idiocy near the early part of the film, the college students get to film the Troll Hunter’s crew and his boss, who go about doing their government conspiracy cover up, which involves dragging a bear carcass onto the scene to take the fall for the troll, and even going so far as using a “bear paw kit” to fake the footprints of the bear.

Put that bear over there. Yeah! That'll fool 'em!

 

I once loved eating Bear Paws as my favorite desert. This kind of ruined it.

And the boss, who apparently wants to keep the secrecy (because he’s Evil Management and not sympathetic to the harddships of his plebian front liners who do all the hardwork), and yet he allows the hapless college students to film every single bit of their coverup! I mean, what kind of coverup lets people film it so that it can be revealed to the world at large?! And it’s not like he didn’t know about it... he even talks straight into the camera and says, “Stop filming. You cannot keep that footage!”

And then he gets into his car and drives away. ZOMG. That is the kind of stupidity you can only find in Found Footage movies.

Ignoring all this dumb shit, let’s talk about the rest of the movie. Which is an even bigger pile of dumb shit. Ignoring the interesting fauna in the film, due to the nature of found footage, we are subjected to even more illogical, internally inconsistent things especially in all the chase scenes found, which are typically the number one biggest offenders in found footage. There’s a part where the camera man gets caught in a cave by a rampaging hoard of trolls, and when he is caught, the camera drops and breaks. Later on it’s turned on again and kept on through the broken lens, and these are the most jarring parts of the movie from a logical, consistency perspective.

The entire movie falls apart when, after the aforementioned scene where the Troll Hunting Society Boss lets the college students go, he then later on comes back for them to get the footage. And he succeeds at the end of the movie... so why is the footage now available for the public to watch? Serious stupidity like this has me gnawing my teeth in frustration.

It’s a shame, the movie had some interesting ideas going on, like how Trolls die from direct exposure to sunlight as a result of an inability to metabolize Vitamin D from sunlight. We saw this in The Hobbit and this piece of folklore is used by the movie for a pseudo-science explanation. But then there are silly things as well, like how Trolls can smell Christians. The movie goes to great lengths to portray the trolls as natural animals that are part of the ecosystem, then all of a sudden introduces this strange ability to smell out your belief system! It makes you go, “What the hell?” and even though the film makers were just trying to incorporate more of the Scandinavian folklore on how trolls hate Christianity, it just doesn’t fly in the face of the picture the movie is trying to paint of what trolls are in nature.

The hapless crew of college students as well are an interesting bunch, with them starting out squeamish at using troll soap – a concoction of troll fat and lye distilled in a frying pan into concentrated essence, allowing you to camouflage your human scent and blend in the troll’s environment, unseen and unsmelt. Later on, as if this sort of things was usual, they enthusiastically apply the soap to keep life and limb safe, and you see just how their obsession with this documentary has changed their psyche and their minds.

It all falls apart though with the ending, which was a huge WTF ending that simply came up as if the film makers were saying, “Okay, we’ve showed off all the trolls we’ve made up, we’ve got nothing left in store, let’s just kill it off and end it there.” That kind of sloppy story-telling is just lousy, but hey I would expect nothing less from the Found Footage genre.

I still don’t understand the fixation the public has with the Found Footage genre, but I guess it makes sense. After all, we’re currently in a society that is in love with Reality Television, and I can’t stress how connected and similar the Found Footage genre is to Reality Television. They’re both cheap, low budget means to crank out blaise entertainment appealing to the lowest common denominator.  I’m sure our fixation with social media has something to do with it as well, but I’ll write about that another day.