Found Footage Fest 2012: The Last Broadcast

Before I begin, I just want to thanks Bill from Outside The Cinema for bringing this movie to my attention. He did a list on his show a few weeks back of movies that are similar to "The Blair Witch Project". Knowing I was going to do this blog-a-thon, I took notes and realized I never heard of "The Last Broadcast". So I just wanted to give him credit for putting this movie in my life.

With that said...

"The Last Broadcast" is less "Blair Witch" and more kinda like "The Poughkeepsie Tapes". The big hullabaloo (like that?) is that "Poughkeepsie" wasn't around yet. But truth be told..."Blair Witch" wasn't around yet! LE GASP! ANOTHER movie about a group of people going into the woods and something spooky happens to them while capturing it on video? WOW!

The story is this. There's a public access TV show called "Fact or Bullshit Fiction" hosted buy two guys. One guy is named Mark and the other is named Locus. A problem immediately sprung to mind when I saw Locus. I was so fucking distracted because Locus looks ALMOST EXACTLY like Sebastian Gutierrez from Films From The Supermassive Black Hole! I mean LOOK!

Yeah, that's super fucking uncanny, it's weird.

Anyway, while I try to push that off to the side, Mark and Seb-er, Locus host this show that talks about the paranormal and stuff like that. The film is from 1998 but the story starts off in 1995, which means not that long prior this fancy new thing called THE INTERNET was unveiled. So using THE INTERNET, the hosts ask their audience for suggestions on future shows and they get asked to look for The Jersey Devil. If you're not familiar with that story, click here. It's too long to explain here. Or watch "The X-Files" episode about it.

So our hosts take that idea and run with it. They get a small crew together and just for laughs they bring along a guy who says he's psychic and his name is James. James acts weird throughout the entire ordeal, having a troubled past and being a reclusive. And look at that, he LOVES this INTERNET thing!

The story jumps ahead a bit as we learn Mark, Locus, and this other guy named Rein all were murdered out in the forest. Only James came back alive. Soon, a huge mount of evidence stacks up against James proving he murdered them and is sentenced to life in prison. This brings us to the "present" (RE: 1997) where a film maker named David is making a documentary about the murders and James.

So at times it does the whole thing of talking to random dudes who "knew" the victims, James' doctor, and other people that just say stuff. During all this, we see pieces of footage from that night in the woods and Locus changes a tape in the camera, but the new tape...is never found! UNTIL NOW!!!! OH NOES!!!!!1

It's played up all mysteriously, that this tape appeared on David's front porch one day in 1997 but the tape was damaged, so he and some chick named Michelle have to piece it all together to figure out what happened. They show parts of it and of course they want to "be real" and have the footage messed up so the sound goes in and out and the picture is distorted.

The footage shows Locus and Rein roaming around looking for Mark. They find a shitload of blood and soon someone behind them murders them. But the tape is too messed up to clearly make out who it is. WHO DID IT?! Was it James?! Mark?! The Jersey Devil! If you DON'T WANT TO KNOW, SKIP THE NEXT PARAGRAPH AND GO TO THE END PLEASE AND THANK YOU!

...

...

Just in case...

Ok. So in the weirdest twist I've ever seen in a movie, the killer ends up being David, the film maker. Why? How? None of this is really explained. I'm going to assume it's symbolic of how the media wants to make a story so in order to do so, the media goes and kills people their own self or some shit. I dunno, it really wasn't explained. It left me royally confused. I am a bit pissed off about this ended cause I was invested in this movie and now it feels like it ruined it for me. I mean...that's it? It couldn't have just been a ghost or the actual Jersey Devil? It's kind of a let down. I guess this is why this movie didn't get as popular as "Blair Witch".

SPOILERS OVER.

Yes, the first part of the movie is interesting, then it gets creepy, then it will let you down. In terms of found footage movies, there are now way better ones to choose from, so maybe just avoid this one at all costs. Ok, if I changed your mind about wanting to see this movie, go ahead and read the spoiler. Yeah, stupid isn't it?



-Jason

Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers

I'll be honest with you. I saw this movie a week ago and I didn't instantly write this review cause I had to let it settle. Kinda like after a bad chicken dinner. I had to come with terms with it. Did I like it? Did I hate it? What the fuck did they do with Angela's character? How can I possibly put it into words? If only I was a better reviewer. Oh, there I go again.

Ok so "Sleepaway Camp 2" takes place five years after the original and we're at some other camp called Camp Rolling Hills, run by a guy named Uncle John. Ugh. Unless the dude was my uncle, I wouldn't send my camp where the guy running it insisted everyone called him Uncle John. That sounds like a pedophile serial killer nickname.

Anyway, it starts with some camp kids telling scary stories and eventually it evolves into the story of what happened in the first movie. Soon a female camp councilor shows up and drags a girl camper away from storytime. The female camp councilor turns out to be Angela from the first film. So get this. She got arrested and was sent to a insane asylum, where she gets a sex change.

I...didn't know insane asylums hand out sex change operations like that. You think they would've frowned upon that, since that's the reason why he/she went crazy to begin with. But whatever. Angela is now fully a female. But now instead of being shy and quiet, she's a HUGE PSYCHO BITCH!! I mean HUUUUUUGE psycho bitch! Yeah, she was kinda psycho in the first film but this time she's a MAJOR psycho. And a giant bitch. I can't stress that enough.

Like here, she drags a poor girl away from the storytime and just because the girl reacts a bit, Angela goes "Oh yeah!" *kill kill kill stab murder die* Then when asked about all the missing dead campers, Angela just tells people "she sent them home", which means if she REALLY sent them home instead of killing them, she'd be single handedly causing this camp to get bankrupt.

Yeah, I'm stalling. I don't have much to say about this movie.

Ok so Angela is a camp councilor and she's a bitch. All the girls she watches over don't like her a lot, especially Ally, the camp slut. And I'll tell you now the chick who played Ally, Valerie Hartman, if you ever wanted to see her tits, this is the best movie because every scene she's in, she shows her tits. Not a complaint, but when you live with a female who walks in on you constantly while watching these shitty movies, and every scene has Ally's tits, she starts to wonder. That's all I'm saying.

There's a set of twins at this camp (Besides Ally's tits) who like to fuck and get high, rather openly I might add. I never been to camp but I've seen a lot of camp movies (YOU DON'T SAY?!?) and it seems like a pretty strict atmosphere. You have to get up at this time, you have to play (UGH) sports. You have to get shirtless. You have to sleep outside. A group of hairy people in jean shorts are constantly shouting at you. It's like PE all summer long. I don't get how these two got away with smoking weed and fucking all the time.

Well, the answer is they don't for long. Angela catches them fucking and smoking and soon knocks both of them out. One sister wakes up on, I'm not fucking kidding, a GIANT barbeque grill and her sister is already burnt down to the skeleton while she's on fire. Man, the kills are interesting in this movie.

There's a scene where a girl just yells I WANNA GO HOME! over and over again and I kept waiting to see how Angela kills her but...she just goes home. Huh. Didn't see that one coming. Oh! I didn't talk about the stars of the movie. So Angela is played by Pamela Springsteen. And YES she is Bruce's sister. And then there's Molly who played by Renee Estevez, Emilo's sister. I guess Chip Hitler wasn't available.

So Molly is the nice sweet girl who has a crush on the hunky boy Sean, but Ally has a crush on Sean too. But Ally takes care of this by fucking random dudes and showing her tits. OH MY GOD I need to talk about this wacky sex scene. So all the girls are going camping but Ally sneaks away to have sex with some guy in the bathroom. The scene starts off by showing their feet and we just hear weird moaning. Then you see the guy like drag Ally across the bathroom like a doll, until stopping to take her top off. Then he drags her to a stall, where he tries to take her bra off but fails, so she does it for him. Then he, I guess, mimics eating her out but she's still wearing her panties so I have no idea what he's doing and she's just like "OH YES DO ME NOW DO ME NOW!! OH GOD!!!" while the guy just fondles her panties. It's all very weird and unsexy. And for some reason, Angela doesn't kill her right away.

There are two boys though who plan on "scaring" Angela by dressing up as, no joke, Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees. Oh clever. But she gets the best of them and dresses up like fucking LEATHERFACE and chainsaws their asses. Seriously. It's...a strange slasher moment.

Uncle John is slowly getting pissed that all these campers are "being sent home" so he fires Angela and she goes off on the deep end. She kills random people for doing the slightest thing like talking too much, for having nude pics of girls, or threatening to tell. Eventually, Angela kills Ally and you won't believe how she does it. She drowns Ally in shit. I'm not even kidding. Shit. She just keeps pushing her down into shit until she died. What a fucking way to go.

Molly feels bad for Angela so she follows Angela to her special quiet place, which is an abandoned cabin up in the hills. There, Molly discovers all the dead bodies of all the people "sent home" and Angela is forced to tie Molly up and hold her prisoner. She doesn't kill her cause she likes her. Eventually, Sean comes looking for Molly and Angela chops his head off for no real reason, then places it in the TV for Molly to watch. Thankfully, Molly is able to escape but like any girl in a horror movie, she can't run and manages to trip and hit her head, knocking her out.

Angela returns to camp, kills pretty much everyone including Uncle John, and then decides to hitch a ride with an annoying cowgirl, whom Angela eventually kills. Molly wakes up, stumbles around the woods and finds a truck coming on down the road. Of course it's Angela. Angela says "Howdy Partner!" cause she's wearing a cowboy hat, the movie just freezes and that's it. The end.

Yeah. NOW you see why I had a hard time writing this review. But after thinking about it and letting it settle, I think it was just OK. I would probably only watch it once in a great while, maybe show some friends, but that's about it. I do love the kills and the fact people's sisters are in this movie. It's kind of a strange film and has a fan of the first film, I'm a bit empty about what they did with Angela. I was kinda annoyed at her bitchyness and just wanted her to silently kill. I guess the film makers were going for that "CAMP" value.

BOOM!

-Jason

Bikini Girls On Ice

Almost every day when I go flipping around Netflix for what to watch I see this movie called "Bikini Girls On Ice" and go "Oh my, that sounds fucking retarded...I must review that soon!" Well, today's the day, folks! And I gotta be honest with you, it's not AS retarded as I thought it was gonna be.

You know you got a slasher movie on your hands when the opening shows a girl who'll never be important to the movie ever again after this opening scene. She shows up at this broke down gas station, wearing a bikini, and looks for help cause her cell phone went out. She calls a friend using a-GASP-LAND LINE AND DOUBLE GASP IT'S A ROTARY PHONE! I'm sure in real life, this chick would look at this thing and go "Uh...how do I slide to unlock?"

After calling her friend about bikini issues, she goes back to her car to find someone chained her bumper to...something off camera. And because women don't know how cars work, she doesn't understand how to simply undo the chain from the bumper and therefore she's killed by a dude who looks like a greasy Jared Padalecki (the tall guy from "Supernatural"), and then to live up to the title, Sam Winchester puts the girl on ice.

Well, that's one girl in a bikini on ice. Just need one more and the title will make sense.

Now we meet Jenna, who's a smart college girl who normally doesn't wear bikinis. Despite this character flaw, she's pretty ok in my book. She gets offers to join schools all over the country! Like University of Lordia! And Aarvard! WOW! Best I can do is get an offer from University of Honix. Anyway, her roommate Samantha (or Sam) LOVES wearing bikinis! And buys one for Jenna! So she can be part of the awesome bikini group that's happening. So what is happening?

Some hot girls at this college we never learn the name of want to organize a car wash and it's run by this somewhat hot but extremely BITTTTTTCHY girl who wants to do this for...pretty much no reason. I mean WHY NOT? It's an excuse to get hot girls in bikini's. So whatever. Anyway, the bitchy girl bosses around this guy named Blake, who looks like a poor man's Shia LaBeaouf. And you have problems if you're the POOR MAN's Shia LaBeaouf.

So yadda yadda yadda Blake wants to fuck the bitchy chick, one of Blake's friends wants to fuck Jenna, a bunch of other hot chicks in bikinis want to show cleavage. There's a lesbian couple and...

Hello? Hello! HEY!! I know, I got lost too when that scene came up!

Anyway, while going to where they were gonna host this car wash, the bus breaks down at the GAS STATION OF DOOM!!! and decide FUCK IT! Let's have it here! And oddly enough, cars actually come by. I guess a bunch of guys got their boner senses and flocked to this gas station. While the car wash is going on, Jared Winchester there kills some lesser characters, including a dog. When the cast starts getting down to counting them on one hand, it becomes night time and everybody wants to leave. Bitchy girl blames Blake for EVERYTHING for no reason reason, especially when he goes missing.

After this point, it turns into your standard slasher. I'll talk about the killer. His name is Moe. I'm serious. This guy's name is Moe. And after he kills someone, he puts their body on ice. This is never explained. When he kills the bitchy chick (YAY!!!!!), he cuts off her bikini top and then that's all we get. Is he harvesting organs? Is he trying to preserve them so he can fuck them? It's never explained.

Eventually, it's down to Jenna and Sam and they manage to find a car that was down the road, get in, and drive away. But they hear a banging in the trunk and Jenna MUST stop to check it out. Hey guess what? It's Moe. And no, I have no idea how he manage to get AHEAD of them and get into the trunk WITHOUT keys but whatever. Moe kills Sam and knocks Jenna out. She wakes up in a tub of ice, runs from Moe a bunch more, and then the old guy that's in EVERY SLASHER MOVIE that warns about the killer shows up to kill the killer while Jenna gets away. And of course, there's a twist ending. The end!

As you can tell, it's your run-of-the-mill slasher. There's one scene with tits and you barely see them, so it's a bit of a let down. But if you're in the mood for a dumb slasher movie with some hot chicks, then I say check this out. I will say MOST of the girls aren't that attractive but eh, what do you want? They have nice tits anyway.

Christ, I'm not winning any points with the feminists, aren't I?


-Jason