Page 1 of 3
Some British kids find a bad, bad tree in this brain-scrapingly dull 'found footage' horror yawn....
New Video / 89 Minutes / 2011 / Unrated / Street Date: February 19, 2013
Is ‘found footage’ on its way out as a horror subgenre? I mean, we’re fourteen years out from The Blair Witch Project, which kind of got the thing going, and then once the more legitimate digital revolution came around, the ease and availability of making films this way became irresistible to the folks behind things like Apollo 18 or the Paranormal Activity series. Bottom line: these kinds of movies are cheap to make, and even if second-week box office is abysmal, you’re still likely to pocket a minimal profit.
I got to thinking about this as I found myself bored completely shitless by Hollow, a new ‘found footage’ movie that debuted on Blu-ray last month. In it, there’s a creepy tree that supposedly has branches that compel folks nearby to hang themselves from it, but the blabbering of the four main players in the picture (Emily Plumtree, Jessica Ellerby, Sam Stockman, Matt Stokoe) is so unbearably awful that I simply couldn’t invest in its narrative.
I was a sucker for Blair Witch just like everybody else, but ‘found footage’ movies might need to go away for a while before they get revitalized in a new way. But in order for that to happen, they’ll have to stop making profits for studios. I can’t imagine Hollow recouping its production costs (that being said, it sure looks cheaply-made), though I have a sinking feeling there are eight or ten new ‘found footage’ movies headed this way in the coming months anyway. Whee!