Considering I got to the point of referencing any found footage film as “yet another found footage film”, I was a little hesitant to watch this Shudder documentary. And I think I was ultimately right. This doc isn’t terrible but it certainly spins its wheels and repeats itself an awful lot while trying to convince us that found footage matters. That it’s important. That it’s niche.

The flick covers found footage from Cannibal Holocaust up through the modern screen life films like Host. It mentions earlier flicks like Peeping Tom which it suggests used the language of found footage in its murders. And then goes for real borrowed glory by arguing that Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the book, not the movie) was the real start (it isn’t the worst argument but you can feel the documentarians reaching).

The biggest flaw is that the talking heads wind up repeating themselves a number of times. And it tries to argue the importance of a genre that could arguably just be boiled down to “it was cheap and we had cameras”. It barely mentions how almost none of these films can think of an ending (much less an explanation) and whatever other flaws they had.

So they were preaching to the choir and I wasn’t up there singing the gospel. I don’t hate found footage, but given I felt the title of this doc should have been “The Found Footage Curse”, maybe I wasn’t really the target market.

As a documentary, I at least learned about a handful of found footage films I hadn’t heard of before (like Hate Crime and some cheap looking UFO abduction movie). I guess that’s a positive if you consider a doc successful if it informs. But the doc also repeats itself and has pretty weak arguments so maybe it’s not that successful. Or interesting.

Score: 74