This guy contacted me in AICN chat tonight and started talking to me about his reaction to THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES at Butt-Numb-A-Thon. At first, I didn’t want to have the conversation. Too many people I like have yelled at me too much about that film already, and until I write my BNAT piece, I don’t want to say anything else about the screening.
But this guy’s been thinking about it since it happened, and he felt like he wanted to share his radically different reaction. I think there’s some stuff he says in here that MGM’s marketing department might do well to pay attention to... I think you can really hurt yourself with the audience if you play the “it’s all real” game too seriously.
But I’ll have more to say this weekend. For now, here’s TheNorthlander, who also just sent us a review of FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL the other day.
Hey guys, TheNorthlander here.
You put 200 film lovers in a room, show them a movie, and me and 4 more people absolutely love it. The rest hate the thing.
This is something I've been thinking about ever since BNAT, but travel and a few days of illness kept me from writing about it.
How does that work?
Well, before I get into detail about the film and my opinions of it; I want to address the things other people have said about it first.
So, in the words of Brian Glover in Alien 3, This is Rumor Control. Here are the facts!
"THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES is a comedy, or a parody of horror documentary movies."
- No it isn't. Nor did the film makers intend it to be one. They set out to make a serious horror film, and that's what this is. It's not funny, or intended to be.
"The filmmakers snuck out the back without doing a Q & A because they didn't get the "right" reactions from the audience, or because the audience didn't think it was funny or laughed in the wrong places or just didn't like the thing."
- No they didn't. They skipped the Q & A on orders from MGM. MGM wants to keep a lid on this being fake for some reason. Hence also the introduction of it as a "real documentary". If you ask me, that's a big mistake because people want the illusion of reality, and not reality itself, presented to them as they watch a movie. There is a difference here, and a vital one.
The reason I say this is because these are the two main complaints I hear about this film.
I don't mind anyone hating THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES at all, really. I just think if you're gonna hate a movie at least do it for the right reason and not because of a misunderstanding, that's all.
Anyway, on to my review.
By this time, most of you probably know what THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES is all about, but I'll present the story to you anyway, in spoilervision:
***SPOILERS***
This is a mockumentary (meaning fake documentary) about a serial killer on the loose, whose den of home video tapes have been found together with a bunch of bodies buried in the back yard.
We follow this as a documentary, we don't know who makes the documentary, we just watch the interviews of the people in charge of tracking the killer and family members of the victims etc.
We especially follow one of the victims, young Cheryl Dempsey, as she is stalked for a few days or weeks, to when she's kidnapped, tortured into slave submission in a basement dungeon somewhere, and held over the course of several years as the killer's "helper".
She's also the only one of his victims to have survived, but by then she's too brainwashed to be of use in hunting him down.
***END SPOILERS***
This is a movie I've been talking with a friend of mine about since Moriarty's review of it in back in May.
I had also seen clips from it on YouTube, clips like this one.
Which is, if seen as a single clip, genuinly creepy stuff. This is the image I had of this film, together with the knowledge that it was a fake horrordocumentary, and that was all. And it was a movie I've been looking forward to a lot.
Which by itself might explain the reason I didn't hate it like so many others did. I happened to know what it was going in, which meant less bagage for me - I didn't have to decide if it was real or not or what they were trying to say with it or anything, I could just sit back and enjoy the thing, as the horror movie that it was.
I think this is an important point for MGM to think of when they market a movie like this. I think during the early stages of tease-marketing, actually letting people think this is something real might be a way to keep people's attention. But at some point before you let them into the movie theater you have to tell them they're watching a fictional film, because people are not stupid. And they don't like being lied to.
Besides, nobody has anything to gain by walking out of a theater thinking a movie was real when it wasn't.
From a ticket buyer's point of view, this doesn't really make sense.
If someone told you THIS IS SPINAL TAP was a real documentary, would you like it as much? Would you appreciate it more, because you didn't take it as the comedy it is?
In the same way, if people are gonna appreciate this as a horror film, it doesn't help to tell them it isn't one.
But apart from that, strictly as a horror movie then, how was it?
Well, it's definetly something I will see enough times to warrant a DVD purchase, and I'm the kind of DVD collector that only buys stuff he intends to see several times over. It's not as good as Blair Witch, but it's still really good and creepy.
And if you didn't like Blair Witch, you might still like this one.
It did have flaws, naturally. Like some have pointed out, if you're a lot into forensics, murder investigations and stuff like that, you're most likely gonna find a bunch of inaccuracies ("Dismemberment expert"?).
Sometimes, it takes itself a bit too seriously. The guy is showing all the tapes lined up on a table, and it has sort of the Spaceballs ship flyover feel to it, you know the one that never ends. They could have cut that table in half.
The balloon girl - I though she was a setup for something that was meant to be payed off later on. It felt like it, to me. Like that balloon girl was someone we were meant to meet and found out how she ended up there. Instead she just vanished from the story.
But other than that, I absolutely found the thing to be a compelling horror movie, effectively told, with creepy images and without the fourth wall. Which is the best thing about mockumentaries, the lack of that protecting fourth wall.
And also, like someone pointed out to me, we don't really know who it is that makes the documentary. It could potentially be the actual killer. Not saying it is, but it's something to guess at.
If you like creepy horror stuff, give this one a go. But see it as a creepy horror movie. If people tell you it's a comedy or a real documentary or whatever, don't listen.
In fact, if anyone ever say a horror documentary featuring the victims like in THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES is real and it's showing theatrically, don't believe it.
