The year found footage found me again

Just when you think an obnoxious trend might be dying, it roars back with renewed vigor.

And sometimes, you're surprised to find yourself kind of welcoming it.

I watched Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones on Friday night, on what happened to be the year anniversary of its U.S. release. I hadn't planned to make it one of the movies I'm cramming for my 2014 list, but it's funny how the availability of a particular movie on Netflix -- plus an 84-minute running time -- can really change your mind about that.

It was one of two found footage movies I watched that night, which gives you some idea how this detestable genre has found its way back on to my radar in 2014.

Into the Storm, which I watched after The Marked Ones, surprised me by also being a found footage movie, though in this case they stuck to the gimmick only when it suited them -- a major problem with films in this genre that I've complained about before.

But the interesting thing about the five found footage movies I've seen in 2014 is that I liked three of them, and liked parts of the other two. In fact, I liked three of them quite a bit, awarding them four stars out of five. Including the fifth entry into the Paranormal Activity series, which should have been no better than a cash grab.

Tops among my 2014 found footage movies is The Sacrament, Ti West's bold decision to stage the Jonestown Massacre -- or something very similar to it -- as a found footage movie. West has been big into rejuvenating and reinventing since he came on the scene, most notably with The House of the Devil (The Innkeepers disappointed me a bit), and The Sacrament is no different. Three guys from a TMZ-type show travel to a remote cult compound to extract one of their sisters, only to discover that the seemingly contented flock of a charlatan cult leader are on the verge of something potentially tragic. What makes the movie so striking, other than the events that eventually get depicted, is that it's the rare found footage horror that does not use nighttime scenes as a crutch to create fear. Most of the fucked up stuff that happens here happens in broad daylight, making for an unconventional horror film indeed.

Then there was the slightly more traditional The Taking of Deborah Logan, which details the possession of a human being by evil spirits. Again it's filmmakers setting out to make a documentary and capturing a lot more disturbing material than they ever expected to capture. The twist here, though, is that the possessed woman of the title is being filmed because the filmmakers are trying to chronicle the progression of her Alzheimer's disease, in exchange for a nice sum of money the family will truly need to cope with the disease. This shrewd decision means that Deborah Logan's erratic behavior, at least initially, can be mistaken for just for the side effects of her dementia. The film then becomes a metaphor for how someone suffering from that disease truly turns into someone else as they ride out its ravages.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is another clever twist on "your typical found footage horror." You wouldn't expect anything about the fifth movie in a series to be remotely original, but The Marked Ones makes an invigorating creative decision that just so happens also to be inspired by a possibly cynical focus on one particular demographic of the viewing public. Apparently, the Paranormal Activity movies are big with Latinos, so this movie shifts from upper middle class white suburbia to lower middle class Latino apartment buildings. You'd call that pandering to that audience if the characters weren't created with such loving care and resistance of stereotypes -- and when some stereotypes do rear their heads (some Latino gangbangers and their large weapons are recruited to get involved with the supernatural disturbance), they have the effect of being fun rather than cruel. Credit goes to the cast for breathing such distinct life into the characters, and some genuinely spooky moments along the way.

The two I didn't like so much must now share the same paragraph, in part because I already wrote a bunch about Willow Creek last week. Even though that was a fairly naked theft of an earlier property (I won't get into it here so I don't have to issue a spoiler alert), it did use some of the techniques of found footage to maximize the fear inherent in the setup. And then we come to Into the Storm, which basically just did not need to be a found footage movie at all. The effects, which are the main reason to see it, are not particularly enhanced by the fact that they are being viewed by someone's camera -- and in fact, the filmmakers just pull away to a completely omniscient camera angle whenever they feel like it, just so we won't miss anything. That's a big cheat, but I did enjoy the effects well enough to feel like I could recommend it as a rainy day movie. The mostly no-name cast also seems pretty committed.

Whether the fact that they were found footage contributed to me liking these movies is not certain. And that has helped me arrive at a fairly basic, but nonetheless kind of revelatory realization: Found footage is just a tool. It's just a means to an end. If a story is good and you want to follow the characters on their journey, that's more important than whether it's realistic that they are all holding cameras. Or that it's supposed to be God holding the camera in some shots.

So one New Year's resolution might be for me not to automatically hate on found footage. If it can give me the kind of creeps that The Sacrament, The Taking of Deborah Logan and Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones gave me, then it is the proper tool to do the job.

The scariest movie of 1999

Warning: Willow Creek spoilers ahead.

Question: How did Bobcat Goldthwait celebrate the 15th anniversary of The Blair Witch Project?

Answer: He remade it.

Except, you know, not nearly as good.

I had been trying not to hear very much about Willow Creek, the latest from the iconoclastic director who brought us such movies as Shakes the Clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie, World's Greatest Dad and God Bless America (actually, I think that's all the movies he's brought us). What I had heard was that I shouldn't hear any more. I knew it was a found footage movie and I knew it was about Bigfoot (the poster tells you as much), but beyond that I didn't know anything.

From the tones in which it was vaguely referenced on various podcasts, I had a sense it took brave risks that didn't pay off, which suggested to me a kind of formal daring of which Goldthwait is certainly capable. I thought it might start out as a found footage movie, then break down the fourth wall and show the actors involved in the task of making the found footage movie. For example.

Uh uh. It's just The Blair Witch Project with Sasquatch.

Like, it's shockingly derivative of The Blair Witch Project. It's like Bob Goldthwait didn't ever see The Blair Witch Project, and wanted to blow our minds with the landmark idea of a movie where a small group of people gets lost in the woods while making a documentary about a creature from local folklore. Except, he had to have seen it, else he could not have copied its details so exactly.

Now, there's a compliment embedded in my accusation of theft, because Willow Creek is indeed scary at times. There's a long take at about the film's three-quarter mark where the tension and fear build to an almost unbearable crescendo, based only on some unusual noises outside a tent.

But the terror of unplaceable sounds in the woods was one of the key elements that made Blair Witch so unbearable. Goldthwait's approach is nothing new, or if so, it's only new in the sense that the movie's most squirm-inducing shot goes on for something like ten minutes. That actual tingle of fear over the sound of the unknown? That's all Blair Witch.

And the climax of the film? It's so Blair Witch that it hurts. You get a momentary glimpse of something shocking/new, then the camera ceases to have a living operator. And then the credits roll.

What's so irritating about Willow Creek, though, is that its half-hour plus of setup is so frightfully dull that it seems like an intentional choice by Goldthwait. You get our protagonists interviewing some locals to set the scene, and you get some warnings by other locals not to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong, all shot at an amateur distance of more than 15 feet way, enhancing the idea that these people are not professionals (but decreasing the tension). Pretty typical stuff, but it's so incredibly bland that it felt willful, almost spiteful. More generously, it felt like a necessary anti build-up that would make Goldthwait''s eventual act of pulling the rug out from under us all the more shocking.

Nope. It's just bad technique. It's just bad filmmaking.

The idea of someone copying Blair Witch, of maybe introducing it to a new generation of teenagers, doesn't surprise me in the least. When nearly everything is getting remade these days, a movie that only steals the same basic premise of another movie seems fair game.

No, the shocking part is that it's this director doing this. Shall we examine some of the movies he's made previously? (Warning: Bob Goldthwait career spoilers to follow.)

Shakes the Clown is about an alcoholic clown framed for murder.

Sleeping Dogs Lie is about a woman dealing with the aftermath of an impulsive act of bestiality.

World's Greatest Dad is about a father who ghost writes his son's suicide note and other material after his son dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation.

God Bless America is about a middle-aged man and a teenage girl who go on a killing spree of people who behave annoyingly.

In short, Bobcat Goldthwait does not have a conventional bone in his body. So where did this act of utter conventionality come from?

One can only guess.

Willow Creek is not an inept movie. It has moments that will send chills up your spine, and it knows how to milk those moments into a string of moments, even a sustained period of dread. Not just any hack can do that.

And Willow Creek might in fact have been the most frightening time at the movies in 1999, if it had come out a few months before Blair Witch and stolen that movie's thunder. But Willow Creek arrived at a time when found footage is a completely moribund genre, especially those movies where documentary filmmakers go missing during the course of their own investigations.

Bobcat Goldthwait usually feels 15 years ahead of his time. Then how did he get so far behind?