The
original Blair Witch ushered in the
found footage phenomenon in 1999 and just when it looked like the sequel-reboot would
finally kill off the sub-genre in 2016, an inventive anthology comes along to
give it a new lease on life. Of course, the unspoken question surrounding found
footage is how it was found. That will definitely be a cause for concern in the
wrap-around segments of Michael McQuown’s The
Dark Tapes (trailer
here)—note
the “To Catch a Demon” segment is directed by SFX artist Vincent J. Guastini,
to make billing more complicated—which screens this Friday during the
Scare-a-Con Film Festival.
In
fact, Guastini’s “Demon” and McQuown’s framing sequences are actually part of
the same overall narrative. As the film opens, some hipsters find some pretty
darned dark tapes, or rather a video camera, outside a theater of some kind. It
seems a physicist, his graduate advisee, and a camera guy were conducting sleep
experiments hoping to document the existence of the demonic figures seen by
those who experience so-called sleep paralysis. Needless to say, they are too
successful. However, before their study collapses into bedlam, McQuown and
Guastini give viewers some eerily convincing pseudo-science to explain the
horrors we are about to see.
Despite
its connection to the connective sequences, “Demon” is the second full segment
that unspools in DT. The first is
arguably the creepiest. In “The Hunters & the Hunted” an attractive young
couple finds their new luxurious house in the Hollywood Hills is haunted by a
malevolent entity. The distressed Karen and David duly enlist the help of a
gung-ho ghost hunting team, but McQuown has a sinister surprise in store for
them that will catch all but the most suspicious viewers completely
flat-footed. As the new tenants, Shawn Lockie and Stephen Zimpel really make it
work.
The
third discrete narrative, “Cam Girls” is by far the weakest. Recorded entirely
as skype and webcam sessions, much like the Swanberg installment of the
original V/H/S, it shows us what a
new web chat recruit and her lesbian lover do with and to their customers
during her blackouts.
Happily,
DT rebounds in a big way with the
closer, “Amanda’s Revenge.” Much to her platonic best friend’s distress, the
titular Amanda is rufied at their graduation party, but for her, it is not so
unlike her regular experiences as an alien abductee. For some reason, she has taken
her mother’s place a victim of choice. However, she intends to fight back in
ways that circumvent their control over electronic devices. There have been too
many poor to middling alien abduction films (looking at you Ejecta and Hanger 10), but Amanda’s cleverness and resiliency are enormously
refreshing. Arguably, that makes two sub-genres redeemed by DT.
