starting th ramp up to halloween
XTRO (1982) - i know people were talking here abt the alien sequels so my pro tip is to just ditch them and assemble your own “alien franchise” comprised of Alien, Dark Star, this one, about 15 mins of Prometheus, uh, maybe the monolith AVP game, some of the funnier kenner toys, the weird licensed comic they had jim woodring write… anyway this one gets kind of goofy and bad outer limits episode in the back half, which is still fun, but has such a good mix of nasty ass effects and weird psychosexual stuff at the start and end that i’d sort of recommend it to anyone still bothered that they turned the xenomorphs into bug things with a known life cycle instead of just being unknowable glimpsed protean Things all the way down
SHIROME (2010) - more koji shiraishi found footage horror, this is a pretty slight one but still very charming for that reason. it’s actually sort of a promo for an idol group called momoiro clover (they did a pokemon theme! and a collaboration with KISS…??) and follows them as they perform a ritual in a haunted shrine in order to gain supernatural assistance in appearing on the variety show they like. there’s some play with whether or not they know whether the horror stuff going on was faked, which i’m not that interested in, but the odd flatness of tone in squeezing horror stuff into the very sterile promo format is fun. i like that whenever the ghost expert appears to deliver more backstory they all just start wailing immediately while he stands there looking awkward. the live idol performance in front of the death shrine was a beautiful bit.
CREEP (2014) - does some fun formal things with the found footage structure but the most memorable and terrifying thing is how well mark duplass channels the “indie small business owner hiring you to code his emotional platformer game” energy, abrupt uncomfortable disclosures and forced bonding and all. it’s like the hannibal x will graham thing if neither of them had taste.
YAMI DOUGA (2012) - collection of japanese “found footage” shorts, the same kind sort of pastiched more memorably in Ura Horror. there’s a crazy part in that one where they get the director of Ju On to appear in a fake news story about investigating sightings of the little ghost kid from the grudge (spoiler: it is absolutely not the little ghost kid from the grudge)… nothing in this one was as memorably crazed but you’re kind of watching for little slice of life details as much as the ghosts, and they’re both kind of fun although also unsatisfactory and more-ish enough that by watching just one of these, you risk becoming one of the people who watches the other 20+ movies in the same series just to chase some sense of actual payoff… perhaps they truly are cursed videos in that sense. but i liked the one where someone basically gets hired on fiverr to perform a grave ritual on film, and has to shuffle back to bonk his camera holder whenever the latter starts asking the obvious questions abt this by reminding him “the camera’s on”, and there’s also a memorably tasteless and dumb one at the end abt harakiri snuff films.
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) - crazy sound design, really memorably sparse and foreboding in ways most other found footage things i’ve seen still don’t get close to - notably missing the kind of “figure walking around the background just out of focus” type antics which i always enjoy but whose absence here gives the emptiness of the house at the end a real weight by the end. i’ve been curious abt checking out the sequel bc kim director’s in it (from Dying For The Crown!!) but considering the nu metal reputation that one has it’s kind of touching that the dumb college kids in this one spend their time driving around listening to kind of a pavementlike track instead. the last gasp of the 90s…
