Rating of
0.5/4
kept putting it off...I wish I still was.
Drive-In Massacre - wrote on 07/17/11
Okay, think about a 14-15 year old Saw/Hostel fan who got a hold of his parents camcorder and tried to make a serious horror-movie with absolutely no concept on how to make one. Now, think about a true-crime, Errol Morris rip-off documentary, with poorly staged interviews. Finally, put those two movies together in an extrutiatingly boring 80-mintes...this is how you get the 'controversial' and mysterious unreleased, 2007 film, The Poughkeepsie Tapes.
Directed by John Erick Dowdle, who also directed the 'REC' remake, Quarentine and the M. Night Shyamalan produced thriller, Devil (yeah, great track record this guy has) I had heard about this movie for years and meant to give it a viewing well over 2 and 1/2 years go, but I kept putting it off...I wish I still was. The Poughkeepsie Tapes is another film in a long line of horror movies that follows the path of...yes, you guessed it, The Blair Witch Project.
Now, before we go any further, I need to mention two things; Yes, there were films likeBWP, before 1999, but not with the same style or amount of publicity. The other thing is that I love that film and find it essentially flawless. Seeing films like The Poughkeepsie Tapes makes me appreciate it even more. similar films like, Paranormal Activity, The Last Broadcast, and Cloverfield to name a few, know that you have to make the unscripted dialogue seem candid and real as possible to make the viewer believe what they're seeing is real...I used to think something like that could be easy to do when I first saw the Blair Witch Project, again, Poughkeepsie Tapes, showed me that that's not entirely true. The interviewees are so ridiculous with their hype for how intense the footage is (one guy goes on to say that, "My wife wouldn't touch me for a year when she accidentally saw a half hour of the tapes), and the acting in the footage itself is even worse, it isn't even laughably bad, it's just angering. To think that the filmmakers thought the audience was so stupid that they would find this even the least bit frightening or suspenseful or entertaining or realistic is an insult.
At first, I thought it could have been a really spooky, interesting serial-murder study...by the first 5 minutes that had dropped and I thought "Well, this is stupid. Really stupid...Like really really dumb, but I like it as a funny-bad movie. Once 30 minutes came around the entire feeling of enjoyment was completely gone, and finally, by the hour mark, I was just pissed off and wanted it to end. Usually I finish movies even if I hate them, I really didn't feel like it for this one, but I did, and I wish I hadn't. Every turn in the case is almost defiantly-predictable, all the cops and psychologists act the way you expect them to act, and badly too...did I mention that enough. The story gets more and more ridiculous, until it peaks around a scene where a guy who is doing an impression of Ted Bundy, who I guess to these people sounded like Matthew McConaughey, gives a useless bit of information and then we talk to a surviving victim a little while later.
So, with all that being said; I had realized by the end of this...thing, that the reason this movie had little/no distribution of any kind (even on DVD) was not because it was "so edgy", "frightening", "violent", or "controversial", it's only because the idea and film is just executed so unbelievably badly that it is not even close to being something with dignity. It only offended me because it was stupid, boring, and badly made, not because of the gore and child murders.
F
