Mockumentaries

As a little caveat pointed out to me by good ol' Karly, the following does not refer to comedic mockumentaries but only the dramatic/scary ones. Comedic ones work because you are well aware that it's not supposed to be taken seriously. That's the point. Dramatic ones however, well...

I already went to town on that movie Troll Hunter. So while I was filling out job applications online today I threw on the movie "The Fourth Kind" because I like Sci-Fi, and it was on TV so I figured why not. The way they set it up was pretty clever. They would show you footage of the "dramatic reenactment" starring Mila Jovovich and that guy who's in all those movies but whose name you can never remember. Then they would show you some "actual footage" with some "actual audio" of the same scene, sometimes side by side in the most annoying way possible. So what's the problem? It's all a dramatic reenactment. Even the actual footage is a bunch of D list actors you're not likely to ever see in another movie which they filmed with a shitty camera from twelve years ago to make it look real. So I guess it's not even a reenactment so much as it's an enactment considering none of it is based on anything that happened. It is incredibly loosely based on some disappearances in Nome Alaska, where the movie takes place, that happened around twelve years ago and apparently the FBI came in and out a few times so of course it was Aliens right? Funny thing is they found a lot of the bodies so it wasn't really that mysterious. Also, it's fucking Alaska. Do you know what else lives in Alaska? Bears. Big ass bears that I'm sure love snacking on stupid drunks who get lost in the woods in the middle of the night. Not to mention the other hundreds of ways you could probably die getting lost in the Alaskan woods which I can only imagine are pretty easy to get lost in, especially when you're drunk. Why am I assuming they were drunk? Again, it is God damn Alaska. What else could they possibly be doing there right now? So I think the Alaskan wilderness theory probably explains the bodies that they didn't find.

But back to the movie. What sucks is that there were a few genuinely scary moments and if they had just filmed this as an actual movie and not some shitty mockumentary, and also taken out Mila Jovovich for someone who actually sounds like a woman (I'm told by Hollywood that she's sexy but I see no evidence of this), then it could have been a great Sci-Fi movie which there are very few of these days (I don't care one bit for Avatar, one screening was enough for me). Then they kept doing that thing where when something scary happened the "actual footage" would suddenly get really screwed up so that you can't actually see what was happening but for some reason the audio works just fine so you can hear all the stuff that is supposed to be scary. You know what would have been great? If they had just made a movie where they show all the scary aliens and people being abducted instead of just suggesting it for an hour and a half.

There can't be any good mockumentaries anymore and I wish Hollywood could just realize that. People know this shit isn't real. The last, and possibly only, good mockumentary was the Blair Witch Project because after that everyone knew what to expect. The first paranormal activity was sort of good, but they ruined the first one by making the subsequent ones. Especially since the third one was a prequel. Gee, wasn't it convenient that all three families had weird husbands who wanted to film shit all the time? And then there was the Last Exorcism, I watched that movie thinking it was soooooo good right up until the very end when they ruined it by also insisting that it was real and not just about how exorcisms are hoaxes, it's sort of hard to explain that movie since I'm assuming most people haven't seen it (I only saw it because I was bored one night and Netflix is a thing). If you're going to make a movie, just make a damn movie. Take those budgets and invest them in something that is actually worth watching.