The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
Directed by John Erick Dowdle
When hundreds of videotapes showing torture, murder and dismemberment are found in an abandoned house, they reveal a serial killer's decade-long reign of terror and become the most disturbing collection of evidence homicide detectives have ever seen.
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What critics compared The Poughkeepsie Tapes to
For simplicity’s sake, below is a little vision board (of sorts) to help you visualize the tapes in question, including a photo from the unsolved Max Headroom Signal Hijacking of 1987 that inspired the film, a still from John Erick Dowdle’s The Poughkeepsie Tapes , and another from Milos Mitrovic & Conor Sweeney’s Homer_A (2017) .
There are camcorder moments that unsettle, almost as The Poughkeepsie Tapes accomplishes with its evidence footage, and yet clue-seeking thrills sell desired excitement short.
Continuity blurs together like a hazy, half-baked combination of The Poughkeepsie Tapes and I Spit On Your Grave , and then Eve unhinges with Braveheart on the mind.
There is a genuine chill to a few of the deaths that is reminiscent of found footage movies like “The Poughkeepsie Tapes.”
It sounds like a pre-packaged community haunted house scenario, but it’s a moderately skillful exercise in style that should help get the Dowdles’ long shelved, and similarly filmed, The Poughkeepsie Tapes , into theaters.
It can't be easy to make a movie cohesive that's tension-fraught, able to convey a story arc and keep a collective cast of characters who're cloaked in darkness and saddled with screaming, but somehow director John Erick Dowdle (The Poughkeepsie Tapes) does just that.
At least director John Erick Dowdle—who also went the found-footage horror route with The Poughkeepsie Tapes—stopped short of having snot drip from Carpenter’s overstressed nostrils.
Director John Erick Dowdle (of the unreleasable “The Poughkeepsie Tapes”) crafts a straightforward copy of the Spanish film, preserving the same plot and scare beats, but altering the corners of the writing to put his fat stamp on the picture.
Like an unfortunately large number of genre filmmakers in the last 30 years, John Erick Dowdle (whose similar "found footage" serial killer flick The Poughkeepsie Tapes has been waiting on a release date for well over a year now) willfully and blindly conflates "horrifying" with "gory", nor does he really seem to grasp the concept of the slow build - no, every scare is blatantly telegraphed, and pretty much the only card up the director's sleeve is to quickly pan over to a pasty-faced ghoul with blood all down its front.
Promising writer-director John Erick Dowdle and co-writer Drew Dowdle (their much-acclaimed, much-delayed debut, "The Poughkeepsie Tapes," currently gathering dust on MGM's shelf) stay mostly faithful to " [REC] " while diverging just enough to make this new version their own.
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Schneider was there for Paranormal Activity, the Dowdles were there for The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Quarantine, and I think it’s safe to say that the shadow of The Blair Witch Project loomed large over the event.
The little-seen 2007 dud Catacombs already squandered such promise, but the Dowdle brothers (Devil, The Poughkeepsie Tapes) have decided to give it another go with As Above/So Below.
Returning to the faux-doc format they helped innovate in such pics as “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” and “Quarantine,” the Dowdle brothers, John Erick (who directs) and Drew (his fellow producer), are by now experts at creating suspense within narrow confines.
John Erick Dowdle directs and co-writes on As Above, So Below -- as he did on likeminded first-person, found-footage horror flicks like The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Quarantine.
Instead, the Dowdles — director/co-writer John Erick and brother/co-writer Drew — rely on the cinematic approach that made them cult creepshow names (the [REC] remake Quarantine, The Poughkeepsie Tapes), beating this long dead Blair Witch nag into the groan-inducing ground.
With help from his brother and partner Drew, he previously made the found-footage thrillers The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Quarantine (a remake of the Spanish horror hit [REC]) before helming the Satan-themed, M. Night Shyamalan-conceived-and-produced elevator spookfest Devil.
The climax, I suspect, was more of a ruse on part of the filmmakers to unnerve audiences in a movie theater; because a select few often buy into this technique as more than just stylized fiction – a problem that stretches back to “The Blair Witch Project” – the implication that the source of such vicious killing sprees may be watching on somewhere in a nearby movie theater no doubt would add ominous suggestions to the experience of easily manipulated moviegoers.