I don’t try to hide my disdain for found footage films. I think that the people who make them often do so as a shortcut – it provides an excuse to avoid spending money on special effects and laying down tracks and setting up shots, which are all expensive and time consuming. Found footage is often a shortcut, and a cheat, if it’s not done specifically to tell a very unique story. Ghost Encounters almost tells that unique story. The initial concept is pretty cool – a group of reality TV show makers lock themselves into a haunted sanitarium, and stuff goes wrong. The idea is that these guys were the first “ghost hunters” before our cable television has become saturated with them. It opens with a producer telling you this isn’t a movie, but rather culled found footage. Mmhm.

Who wouldn’t love to have their own personal soundtrack playing wherever they went? An epic theme song that announced your arrival when you walked into a room or a electric guitar riff whenever you might need an extra rush of adrenaline – these touches would make every move you made seem movie worthy. And sure, you can throw in your iPod ear buds as you walk around town or crank up your car stereo as you hit the gas to get a similar effect, but without having someone follow you around with a boom box, having a personal soundtrack is not very likely because (unfortunately) that is not how things work in real life. In normal, everyday life music isn’t always playing, underscoring our more emotional moments and highlighting the intense ones. With the emergence of found footage films bringing a new style of filmmaking to the industry (with mixed results and reactions), the idea that these films are made up of footage anyone could capture if they were to pick up a camera and hit record leaves these films (as is the case in life) without much music. Real life is full of ambient noises, awkward pauses and people accidentally talking over one another so a film capturing these moments would break that unedited feeling if it had perfectly scored music fleshing out scenes because that is simply not true to reality.

The Devil Inside is the talk of the town for two reasons: number one, it made around $35 million in its opening weekend, which is big no matter what qualifier you tack on, but when that qualifier is a reported $1 million acquisition cost, it’s gigantic. Number two (heheh), it sucks. It sucks bad. That’s nothing new, really, as everything about The Devil Inside screams shitty movie. First of all, it’s from the team that brought you Stay Alive. Second, it’s found footage. Third, it’s an exorcism movie. I’m surprised that people went to see it, because you list those three qualities and I am about as far from interested as possible. But rather than just throw another voice on the “what the fuck” bonfire, I wanted to take a few minutes and examine what we can learn from this situation.

If the notion of another Blair Witch movie exhausts you, try to imagine mustering up the energy and excitement for returning to the project that put you on the map creatively. After the film came out in 1999, it represented a grand shift in thinking, but it didn’t really lead to success for co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Both have languished in the tepid world of indie horror filmmaking, which may be why they’re so eager to get back to the woods. However, Sanchez is coming off the heels of a critically praised Lovely Molly – which played at Toronto. Still he’s championing a return to Blair Witch and waiting on Lionsgate to stop dragging their feet. “It’s completely up to Lionsgate,” Sanchez told Bloody Disgusting. “Dan and I are ready to do it. We’ve been toying around with a sequel idea that we really like. It’s just a matter of getting our schedules in line and having Lionsgate sign off on the idea. We’ve been ready to do a ‘Blair Witch’ movie for a long time. We’re as close as we’ve ever been to making it happen but it’s still not a guaranteed thing.” The silver lining is that Sanchez and Myrick want to move away completely from the awful, no good, very bad sequel Book of Shadows. Plus, there is no plan to include first-person filmmaking in the new project. But at the root of it all, this would still be a years-later sequel to a property

Welcome back to Commentary Commentary, where we dive into the shiny backside of your favorite DVDs and bring you the magical insight that comes from hearing filmmakers talk. This week we’re going back to the woods, trekking through miles and miles of uncharted forest area, and looking for some lost film students. Not necessarily film school rejects. You can’t really be rejected if you wind up dead in the woods, right? Doesn’t matter. This week we’re listening to the commentary track for The Blair Witch Project, the infamous, no-budget shocker that became a cultural phenomenon in 1999. It also remains a sure-fire way to scare your friends or making them violently ill from all the shaky cam. Here’s what we learned from the commentary on this, the movie that kicked off the latest trend of found-footage moviemaking.

You did it, godammit. They just invited us to dinner. Synopsis A small band of American filmmakers departs for the Amazon to document the lives of warring cannibal tribes. Two months after they’ve vanished into the so-called Green Inferno, a rescue team led by anthropologist Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) discovers the documentary crew died at the hands of the Yanomamo tribe. Monroe retrieves the crew’s footage and brings it back to New York. The found footage depicts an orgy of shocking sadism – perpetrated by both the cannibals and the “civilized” Americans.

This week’s Culture Warrior is getting its bunker ready for Y2K.

To movie critics (including myself): yer doin’ it wrong.

Despite this being highly unscientific, I’m curious to know whether to base my new bootlegging business in theater lobbies. (FSR does not condone bootlegging or standing around in theater lobbies).

This week’s Culture Warrior talks fake movies that look real but are fake, from Paranormal Activity to Blair Witch to old people getting in it with garbage.

Ed Sanchez and Dan Myrick want to take us back into the woods. Is there anyway on earth we should trust them again? Should we leave bread crumbs behind?

A CIA spook and a team of Special Ops drive deep into the Afghanistan desert to find a religious leader who may have stolen nuclear warheads or in possession of something far more dangerous.

Horror movie fans can enjoy the visceral experience presented in Quarantine.

It’s been 40 years since George A. Romero introduced the world to his special brand of flesh-eating zombies, and the landscape of American cinema hasn’t been the same since.