Tag: found footage

Monday Morning Movie Review: Backrooms (2026)

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Dr. Wife and I took in another indie horror-ish flick on Saturday, checking out the Internet sensation Backrooms (2026). The film is based on director Kane Parson‘s YouTube series, Backrooms, which itself is based on a 4Chan thread from 2019. “The Backrooms” are a series of liminal spaces that exist extradimensionally, but are accessible from the real world. They consist of seemingly endless corridors decorated in the drab yellow wallpaper and builder-grade carpet of every 1990s dentist office. Indeed, the original photo that inspired the Backrooms is from a Wisconsin furniture store renovation in 2002.

Neither of us have watched the YouTube series, and I knew very little about the Backrooms extended universe. I wanted to go into the film blind, although I knew a little bit of the plot and characters just from watching reviews. That said, here is a playlist of the original YouTube series:

Having seen the film, you don’t really need to watch the YouTube series to appreciate what the director is doing, and to get some hazy understanding of what the Backrooms are. However, be aware going into the film that you’re going to leave with more questions than answers, and that is the point.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Spree (2020)

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Yours portly is playing catch-up on the blog after a grueling Homecoming Week at work.  Apologies for delayed and/or missing posts lately.  —TPP

I’m not a huge fan of “found footage” films, most of which are just knock-offs of The Blair Witch Project (1999).  Of course, I see the appeal for studios:  these flicks are cheap to make, and offer (at least in theory) a more visceral experience.  There are exceptions (such as today’s film), but found footage flicks typically devolve into lots of shaky camera work and improbably perfectly placed cameras that always seem to capture the exact video and audio that they need to tell the story.

Naturally, that’s because it’s all directed and staged, but it reveals the lie inherent in these films.  Far from being “found,” the footage is actually quite curated—but in a sloppy manner to create the illusion of us just picking up someone’s perfectly edited (in-camera!) VHS tape.

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of reviewing security camera footage will know that they rarely capture anything worthwhile.  The footage is too grainy to identify anyone positively; audio is lacking or non-existent; footage gets overwritten with new footage quickly.  The frustration for law-abiding citizens, of course, is that security cameras never seem to get the right angle to catch criminals, but always keeps an eye on the rest of us.  CCTV might help keep down crime, but it really just ends up monitoring the rest of us.  It’s the definition of anarcho-tyranny.

But I digress.  I recently watched a good found footage film, 2020’s Spree.  It’s a horrific dark comedy, mostly because it shows the extreme toll of living in a terminally-online world, in which shallow and hallow people gauge their self-worth in terms of likes, impressions, and reactions.

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