The Outwaters is a found footage film that wins my Skinamarink Only Slightly More Watchable award for February, 2023. More power to filmmakers and their microbudgets but if you give me nothing to work with, then I’m going to feel nothing for your movie.

A quartet of boring musicians go out into the desert to film a music video. And then Weird Cryptic Shit happens for a solid hour and then the movie decides to end.

The first forty to fifty minutes of this found footage film has the usual annoying traits of too many found footage films: very boring average people doing and saying very boring and average things. Sure, wandering aimlessly in the desert has the benefit of, y’know, being in the desert, but the characters aren’t interesting, say nothing interesting, and nothing interesting happens.

And then there’s a mysterious booming sound in the distance and things just stop making sense. Mostly fast, shaky camerawork in the dark, flashes of very bloody imagery, slightly creepy creature effects, maybe some time warps? Delusions? Lights and floating stars? I dunno. Short of unearthing the Rosetta Stone locked away in the screenwriter’s head, I think the most you can get out of the imagery is theory. Maybe there are more hints to work with that I missed but I wouldn’t want to sit through this mess again to find them. Sorry.

It doesn’t help that the movie wins the Blair Watch Project Booby Prize for Too Many Minutes Staring at a Black Screen award. Yeah sure the sound design is meant to compensate for a black screen… or a screen with a pinpoint of light for minutes on end. And maybe that’s scary for some people, but it’s just annoying to me.

I guess I’m not the kind of person who gets scared at loud noises and vague imagery. I pretty much hate this boring movie for annoying me for almost two hours.

Score: 56