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[DOSSIER]: Westall, VIC

This one comes form my own country: Victoria, Australia.

At 11am, on the 6th of April 1966, more that 200 students and teachers claimed to have seen an Unidentified Flying Object fly over Westall High School and descend into a grove of pine trees known as the Grange, before taking off over the Melbourne suburb of Clayton.

Witnesses described it as being grey, saucer shaped, and with a slight purple tinge to it. It was apparently the size of about two family cars, passing over a section of the school as it disappeared from view into the pines. After about 20 minutes, it’s said to have climbed into the air, turned sideways, and departed north-west at great speeds.

The witness reports were mixed. A science teacher described it as having a faint green tinge, while several witnesses claimed to have seen it being chased by Cessna-like aircraft. Some even said there were not one, but two or even three craft.

In the end, this became one of Australia’s best known UFO sightings, and is even commemorated at the Grange parklands with a series of plaques and -- even better -- a flying saucer playground.

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[DOSSIER]: Antônio Vilas Boas

It’s not uncommon to find something in UFO lore that makes you wonder if the F stands for Freudian.

The story of Antônio Vilas Boas -- often penned as the seduction of Antônio Vilas Boas -- is the story of a Brazilian farmer who claims to have been abducted in October, 1957.

There he was, plowing his field, when the engine cut out and a craft with purple lights descended from the sky. He was manhandled inside by aliens in suits, where they stripped and examined him, took a blood sample, and covered his naked body in goo.

Then, after being left alone in a room for some time, a naked woman appears and... the rest is history. According to Boas, they never kissed and she growled like a dog. Of course, they did it twice.

When they were done, she pointed to her navel and then up to the sky with a smile, and Boas was taken on a tour of the ship before being returned to his field. He went on to become a successful lawyer, and stuck to his story even decades later.

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I have so many questions...

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Aliens: Zone of Silence

Film Review!

To me, this film is a great example of the difficulty found footage flicks have with the general public.

If I’d been relying on Rotten Tomatoes alone, I would have never found it. The score there is so abysmal that I probably would have just skimmed over it and gone on to watch one of the other five FF films that RT scores favourably.

I’m calling this the Floater Gag Reflex; it’s when a fan of horror, in a broader sense, or perhaps just an average viewer, comes across a found-footage film and immediately hates it. Not based on the quality, but because they’ve been conditioned to believe that, unless it does something drastically different from other films, the subgenre is inherently stupid. Like reality TV or soap operas, found-footage is a bit of a niche. You either like it or you hate it, and it says very little about you except about what you enjoy.

I’ve grown to rely on the Found Footage Critic, a sort of by us, for us review site. Most of the reviews there are more favourable and, to my experience, more reliable than we would find offsite. Even the youtube trailer for this film was littered with a horrible vote score and people calling it utter trash, but the movie... honestly? It didn’t deserve that.

Now I’m not saying this is the best film I’ve ever seen, but it was fun. The movie follows Morgan, the sister of Hal, who is on her way to the Mexican Zona del -- a “Bermuda Triangle” in the desert where radio signals die -- to find out what happened to her brother and his friend. Naturally, they went off into the desert chasing UFO’s and happened to find some and, as such, the film jumps backwards and forwards between Morgan and Hal, usually implementing some in-character reason for the flashbacks.

The Zone of Silence is a real place, with real lore behind it. In 1970, a US test missile went off course and landed in the zone. Of course, it was found and recovered but don’t let that detract from the eerieness for you.

I honestly found this a lot better than Skinwalker Ranch. There wasn’t any forced backstory or attempts to get us to identify with the characters, nor is it trying to throw us a curve-ball by having the ultimate threat be some hybrid ghost/alien/indigenous frankenstein. It’s just plain, simple, grey aliens (although we never see them directly), and some chick in the desert with a hardcore camera setup for reasons.

And this is where general horror afficianados will have issues with found footage; it’s a flawed subgenre. We love it. We love the flaws, we love the campiness, we love the fact that you have to ignore all the shitty reasons they have for filming (hey, this is Darron. He has a vlog and it’s 2016 and you know how big vlogs are!)

This movie managed to handle the filming issue pretty well. The first pair were filming their UFO hunting, while Morgan was going in search of her brother, in a dangerous place, where she knows they likely disappeared for good. She’s carrying a heavy camera setup, including several go-pros, a motion-detecting camera for night, lasers triggers, and is pretty much on the air to her IT dude 24/7.

I mean, yeah, it’s not perfect. But it’s way better than the lazy “Oh, he just films everything” we usually cop (is he a stalker?). While I wouldn’t call the film revolutionary like FFC has, I thought it was fun, decent, made me care about the characters without a backstory dump, and some of the effects and shock-scenes were pretty well done.

ROUND UP!

The Good:

The actors are pretty decent. In particular, I found myself enjoying the initial scenes of her brother and his mate heading out to the desert to chase UFOs.

The character utilises a lot of mid to high-end filming gear, and the quality is reflected in the film. Some of the scenes from the former characters are shaky and low-q, owing in no small part to the hand-helds they use, but the bulk of the film is fine.

It doesn’t rely too heavily on cheesy special effects, instead using what I assume are actual, physical techniques. There are scenes where both sets of characters see lights off in the distance, and I presume there is actually somebody standing out there (or, like, using a drone) to make said lights.

The effects that they did implement were honestly quite good. Necklaces levitating and bright lights shining through the tent. I don’t know what budget they were working with here, but I was impressed!

Nice pacing. While I did find myself occasionally looking at the progress bar and trying to guess when things were going to get lit, it didn’t feel particularly slow.

The ending was pretty good. I post a lot of spoilers, but all I’ll say here is that they do something I haven’t seen too much in other abduction movies.

The Bad:

Film glitches. I know these are a staple of FF, but they drive me mad. There are more ways to cut between scenes and increase tension than having the video fuzz out!

There are a couple of scenes where the characters have cringey and unbelievable emotional breakdowns. I felt like this was more of a directing/writing issue because the actors were otherwise decent. Ultimately, I didn’t feel like a character who has enough sense to gear up and train physically and for survival for a trek through the desert would breakd down like that.

We don’t get a full alien reveal, but honestly... I know I complain about this in movies a lot, but I can understand it in found-footage. These films are low budget, and the team have to make do with what they can. Besides, poor aliens frequently ruin the film.

I would have liked to see more of the ending sequence but... that’s not REALLY a down. It’s just that they managed to pluck a string, and I would have liked to see where that led.

The Ugly:

I honestly didn’t find anything hugely objectionable. This is rare!

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[DOSSIER]: The Ilkley Moor Entity

This is one of my favourite photos out there.

The story takes place in 1987. Philip spencer, the witness, had moved his family to the Yorkshire area after four years working as a police officer in another city. On a December morning, he went out for a walk across the Moor to his father-in-law’s house, intending to catch a photograph of the famous hovering lights that frequently wound up in UFO reports.

So he loads his camera with good quality film, good enough to catch something in low-lighting conditions, and sets off, bringing with him a compass for navigation in the early morning light.

According to Spencer, he was looking for some photograph angles when he spied the strange creature standing a ways off. The creature seemed to gesture for him to stay away as he snapped a picture, and as he chased after it, it led him to a dome-roofed craft that took off in an instant. Startled, he took the half-hour walk to the nearest village, where he realised two things:

His compass now pointed south.

The village clock showed the time an hour ahead of his watch (actually, depending on where the story is posted, it’s one to two hours difference).

Later on, Phil underwent hypnotherapy as an attempt to regain the hour (or two) of missing time. He claims to have been abducted and examined by the small creature, whom he describes as being about four feet high, having blue-green skin, large black eyes and pointy ears. After the examination, they showed him around their craft and showed him images of the environmental destruction of earth and a series of images that he refuses to discuss because he was “sworn to secrecy.”

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FILM REVIEW!

For me, this movie highlights a lot of what I think is wrong with contemporary found footage films.

Don’t get me wrong; I fucking love found footage. But the problem is that every second or third film released in the last decade or so tries to emulate the “Paranormal Activity Method”. Something unexplained happens. A team of security whatsits come in and install cameras around the house to catch this dastardly thing in the act. Jump scares ensue.

The problem with this movie is writing. The actors are good, the effects and sets are good, and while the film gets off to a rocky start I felt like the premise was genuinely interesting. But it goes to too much trouble to establish backgrounds for the characters and tries too hard to explain what is happening and how it is relevant.

So it starts like this: Cody, the 10yo (or something) son of Hoyt goes missing in broad daylight. Literally disappeared. Everybody thinks Hoyt faked the footage (which OBVIOUSLY exists) and that he murdered his son. I guess the lack of evidence leads to his legal exoneration but continued suspicion, or he’s still under investigation or something. I don’t know, it’s not really made that clear.

So what else can we do but send in a group of military investigation thingimajigs to investigate? We’ll set up a bunch of cameras, run around with flashlights, and just laugh and laugh!

My biggest problem with the film is that it can’t decide if it’s an alien abduction or ghost flick. The initial scenes lead me to believe abduction, but then it throws in all these apparitions and Native American stuff and fucking WARGS from Isengard, and in the end I felt like I was sitting on the fence between these two genres that probably shouldn’t be connected.

I realise that the film is loosely based on the actual Skinwalker Ranch, which has its own lore and history, but I really didn’t feel like these things belonged in the same film. It’s kind of a larger problem of paranormal claims in general, with the Ranch itself being the site of “sightings of UFOs, bigfoot-like creatures, crop circles, glowing orbs and poltergeist activity”. We can’t just have one phenomena at a time, we have to throw the WHOLE barrel of fucking monkeys in there.

I’ll be honest here and say I skipped through the final twenty minutes or so. They find a VHS tape in a box in the barn which the people who investigated the ranch in the sixties left in a buried box for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON and then they play it. There’s some eerie music, a kid doing the whole ghost mouth thing, and then we cut back to IRL where shit really gets out of hand. Lights everywhere, somebody suicides, a skinwalker appears in the house and then they all go to disney world together. I don’t know, I didn’t see what happened to them in the end. I presume they all died.

Ultimately, the film was unsatisfying and kind of tired to me. I guess the writers were trying to be original by having the threat turn out to be some ancient Native American horror thing with spaceships, but the whole “UFO thing is actually Indigenous thing” thing isn’t exactly new. And, to be frank... the way the film handles First Nations is low-key racist.

ROUND UP!

The Good:

The film starts okay. I felt like it dove into the action a little hard but at the start, I was genuinely interested to see where this was going.

The initial scare-setup was good. I was creeped out.

The acting is pretty decent. Even when the characters are being cringey, I felt like it was a writing and directing issue rather than the actors themselves.

The Bad:

The film can’t decide if it’s a UFO or Ghost thing. One minute there’s aliens crawling around and the next there’s warg footprints in the barn. I felt like they needed to commit to a genre better.

The motives of the Skinwalkers are humorously unclear. Abducting children or accidentally killing a bunch of bats mid-air is one thing, but then they walk around murdering livestock (for science, obv) or just killing the dog for no reason.

The Skinwalkers themselves turn out to be anti-climactically unscary. The producer seemed to be going for “Not Grey” but somehow landed on “Grey Zombie Thing”.

The movie takes a while to get going. At about the half-way point I realised how many days had passed in the story and found myself wondering why the characters were devoting so much time to this.

Fucking Wargs. Down to a T. I wouldn’t be surprised if this actually constitutes IP theft.

Ghost mouth. I’m so sick of ghost mouth. There are other ways to make ghosts scary, guys! Also, it so often tends to be poorly done, with the cheap editing clearly visible. That was also true for this film.

The Ugly:

It tries too hard to explain itself. There are entire scenes where a character is explaining how something they saw is significant, or where somebody gives us an information dump that we really didn’t need. I don’t need to know about how the art on the wall near the skeleton (the castle of AAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH) was actually a spaceship and how the people you know who are legit qualified say this is true.

Fucking Magical Indian! Guys, you made this in 2013. I know it’s been five years, but have our understandings of appropriation and racial stereotypes really come so far since then? This guy literally turns up because they want to “make contact”. So he lights a fire, sings some songs, has a mini heart-attack and then goes “I cannot help you; you should leave!”

Ultimately, this movie was a disappointment. I give it banana out of ten.

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Film Review: The Fourth Kind (2009)

WELCOME TO MY SPOOPY BLOG!

Since this is my first post, I should probably say something about myself. Hi. I’m me. I like shitty horror movies and books that nobody else likes, and I’m a fan of the UFO culture (subculture? whatever) without actually being a believer. I’m a consumer, nothing more.

I should probably state here that I’m not really a good film critic, and I frequently disagree with audiences on these specific genres. Shitty plotlines are my bread and butter (so long as there are UFOs, aliens or ghosts involved), jump scares make me jump scared, and I can forgive pretty much anything so long as it spoon-feeds me my favourite set of tropes.

Some of these (jump scares et al) have to do with my anxiety disorders. Others have more to do with the fact that I’m a terrible person and probably shouldn’t be listened to. You’ve been warned.

Well, that was nice! Let’s move on.

[SPOILERS BELOW]

The Fourth Kind is unique in that it attempts the found footage genre with a spin, displaying “real footage” along with, and often alongside, “reenactments” by actors.

Actually, some of the talent in this film is impressive. Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element, basically all the resident evil), Will Patton (Falling Skies, Remember the Titans, the Postman), Elias Koteas (Chicago PD, the Prophecy) and Olatunde Osunsanmi (this). That’s not a bad cast at all, and even though some of these actors multipassed their career peaks a while ago, I still felt enthusiastic about seeing them here.

So the premise is pretty simple. Psych lives in remote town. Psych is a hypnotherapist. Townspeople are being abducted by aliens with no memory. Psych is a hypnotherapist. Hypnotherapy ensues.

One by one, Dr Abbey Tyler (Jovovich) begins to realise that her clients are reporting some pretty identical and unusual circumstances. For a start, they’re all insomniacs, and it’s the year 2000 so nobody has smart phones yet. Also, every one of them reports that the source of their insomnia (I think, bits of the movie are hard to follow) is an owl looking in their window.

This is one of the things this movie does that I enjoyed. The owl (pictured) is a pretty good visual representation of the archetypal grey alien. I could imagine these people looking out their window and seeing a grey, only for their brain to scramble what they saw into something they can actually accept. I was genuinely creeped out by them saying that, for some reason, they feel like the owl was actually inside the house at some point, staring down at them from the foot of their bed.

So, Tyler decides to guide one of her clients through hypnotherapy, leading her down a path that results in a five-person murder suicide, a self-snapped neck, and a whole buncha screaming. Seriously, you should probably turn this movie down a tad.

This isn’t my favourite abduction film, and the only reason I’m reviewing it first is because I’d kinda forgotten what it was about and decided a rewatch was in order. In terms of the grotesque, it did bring a fair bit to the table. The recording Jovovich takes early in the film was pretty good, and if that wasn’t Jovovich herself, then I sincerely hope that person has a long and fruitful career in screaming. That was like, Sheila, bring the pepper spray level screaming.

But aside from the jump scares, the screaming, the levitating, the disfiguration... I really didn’t feel like there was much meat on the bones. The story itself is just a variation on the “lonely town is plagued by $paranormal_thing” trope, and although it had some good talent I don’t feel like it used it well enough.

Take Will Patton, for example. He plays a police officer, but his only role throughout the film is to provide legal chafing. Jovovich will dig a little deeper, revealing something new at the expense of somebody’s wellbeing, and then Patton shows up on the scene and says “THAT’S IT. THIS CIRCUS IS OVER!”

And Koteas’ role was more or less superfluous. In theory, his character shows up to provide some misplaced rationality and, eventually, corroboration to Jovovich’s therapist. But there was nothing here that could not have been cut and added to Abbey Tyler herself, and I feel like providing her own reason and “this can’t be right” logic would have added some much needed depth. Instead, Tyler runs with the yarn as far as it will go and, in the end, I think the producers just wanted some Koteas in the movie.  I can’t really blame them.

Ultimately, this movie is fun in the way that a ghost train is fun. It’s crappy, and cheesy, and not really well thought out, but if you can wear your horse blinkers well enough to tune out the obvious plot holes... meh, it’s kinda fun.

ROUNDUP

The Good:

The premise (multiple patients reporting seeing an owl that somehow comes inside the house. Also insomnia) is creepy. It lasts all of five minutes, but in those five minutes so-help-me I was interested.

The owl itself is genuinely creepy, and I can totally see a grey in there (so glad we don’t have many owls in Australia)

The combination of “real” footage with “reenactment” does, at times, work quite well. I didn’t feel like the film used this effect to the best of its ability, but I can see potential there.

The ambient horror effects like screaming, disfiguration, levitation, etcetera were generally well done.

Elias Koteas

The Bad:

Many of the characters serve no role. For example, Abbey Tyler’s daughter is a blind girl whose only purpose is to mope around for a few scenes and then get abducted at the end of the movie, never to be returned. Which leads me to:

Many of the characters have backstories which don’t matter to the plot. Why was she blind? Did the aliens make her blind? Is she faking it because she’s a little shit like her GODAWFUL brother? We may never know. Probably.

The film tries too hard to make us care about the characters. Abbey Tyler’s husband was MURDERED. Or not. Did you know that? Do you love her yet?

The Ugly:

NO ALIEN REVEAL! This is pretty much unforgivable for me. The whole reason I watch these is to stare into the dark, soulless eyes of the movie. I mean, the aliens. Instead, they only show us shadows and representations. I get why they wouldn’t show them; crappy alien design and implementation often ruins the film. It takes us out of it, it turns the fear into funny. I get it. But if you’re not going to try, don’t make an alien movie.

The “real life” footage characters are unforgivably annoying. The “real” Abbey Tyler is actually so awkward looking that she could have played the film’s alien. Little makeup, a bald cap, some black contacts, VOILA! Grey alien. The problem was that, in the role of the therapist, she rarely exibits more emotion than an emotionless alien would have, and when she does, it’s so awkward and annoying that you hope the aliens take her away and we won’t have to watch her anymore. I’m not even fucking kidding!

All in all, it’s a decent film as far as horrible films go. It’s a part of my “essential abduction film” list, and if you’re a terrible person like me, then you should add it to yours. If for no other reason than the sweet, sweet cred.