Look: You don’t need me to tell you that things are hard right now. And there are much worse things in the world than an imperfect movie with modest goals that mostly wants to make you laugh and mostly succeeds.
Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project is just such a movie. It purports to be made up of the found footage from a documentary about the making of an ultra-low-budget found footage horror movie that we can assume all went terribly wrong. And really, it’s less complicated than that sounds, basically mashing up the mockumentary and the found footage horror, two genres that are understandably attractive to independent filmmakers who don’t have much money. The found footage genre, in particular, has a largely terrible track record post-Blair Witch, being the sort of movie anyone can make on the cheap, which leads to a lot of lazy decisions and hacky work. But what’s fun about this film is that it shows the kind of creativity that can result from total chaos on a movie set, like when it turns out one of your lead actors who’s also supposed to operate a camera has no idea how to operate a camera, and when one of your major backers is expecting Alan Rickman to star in the film even though the actor is dead.
Now, it’s all incredibly silly, and there are plenty of jokes that are clearly trying too hard or that we’ve seen a dozen times before, but the movie has the good sense to underplay a lot of its humor, and so we’re surprised by the good jokes, and we can largely forgive the bad ones. Broadly, the film tells the story of a small crew at a cabin in the woods that’s making a movie about a killer sasquatch, and then unusual things start happening on the set and to the crew. Admittedly, it doesn’t all make sense once we’re in it, and there are way too many ideas flying around, but the movie does gleefully crib from its inspirations and I’d much prefer a movie that understands it’s not reinventing anything over one that expects us to believe its warmed-over style is something new.
Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project is on VOD.
