Justin Barber
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But for a genre whose creative peak began and ended with The Blair Witch Project (still one of the most overrated horror movies of all time), Phoenix Forgotten does something that few other found-footage movies can be bothered with: it makes us genuinely care about the protagonists.
There will be a lot of comparisons made between Phoenix Forgotten and The Blair Witch Project (even Barber referenced it during our interview earlier this week), and I’ll be the first to admit that the former does certainly owe a lot to the latter.
It’s a clever and fresh approach to a genre that, following the success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, has been done to death by countless horror films since.
It appears to have taken a surprising commitment of talent to turn out the blandly generic Phoenix Forgotten, another disappointingly derivative imitation of The Blair Witch Project, this time mashed up with the X-Files franchise.
Based on a real-life 1997 UFO sighting that's since been widely debunked but is still widely discussed, Phoenix Forgotten does what The Blair Witch Project also successfully did: It jumps off from reality and slyly mixes in fiction.
Most found-footage horror films owe a sizable debt to The Blair Witch Project , but few have aped the genre’s touchstone quite as shamelessly as does Phoenix Forgotten, which chronicles the mysterious disappearance of two young men (one named Josh!) and a young woman who got lost in the middle of nowhere while shooting a documentary about a paranormal phenomenon.
But that in-joke isn’t nearly as funny as the brief sequence in which Chelsea Lopez’s Ashley does her impression of Jodie Foster on the verge of a wormhole in “Contact.”
Watch Ashley Foster, the character, impersonate Jodie Foster, heroine/actress, in a scene from a movie (“Contact”) that was new when “The Phoenix Lights” lured the “Phoenix Forgotten” off the map.
T.S. Nowlin (“Phoenix Forgotten”) adapted “The Death Cure” screenplay, and he improved it to a certain extent, jettisoning other ridiculousnessas telepathy-inducing microchip trackers (not kidding).