Man, if someone hadn’t invented woods there’d never have been found footage movies.
That’s my biggest revelation at the end of 2023.
Think of it, from BLAIR WITCH on there have been dozens of found footage films made in, around, and about the woods. Those big old spooky places are just too fertile for creepy stuff and we have ourselves to blame. We need to maybe clear cut the joints more to really put an end to this.
That’s totally the key.
I kid.
I kid.
It is interesting though how many found footage do use the woods and wooded places as the set or the reason for what happens in these movies. It’s hard not to get the willies when you go out into deep, deep forest because we all wonder What If…what if we disappeared. What if an animal attacked. What if a person attacked. Forests and woods are primordial places. Our phones stop getting signals. It’s easy to get lost. It’s easy to just disappear. It makes sense why we’re inspired by them. They take us back to the days when we were still living in the shadows and not commanding them. Then you have the fact that you have mood, free sets you don’t need to decorate, and you can tap into that age-old fear.
The thing is though that it’s not enough to just pop into the forest and say – Oh no, we’re scared, there’s something happening!
You have to make it a concrete THING to fear. You have to earn the terror. You have to earn the investment from the audience. It’s too easy to just fall in love with the scenery and assume that your actors will figure it out. I have seen far too many movies that make the woods do all the heavy lifting and don’t bring anything else to the movie. You can shoot it as well as you want, you can have actors that can emote, but unless there’s a reason to be there with you in those woods it’s just another in a long line of movies that never got past the Where of it all.
THE LOST VLOG OF RUBY REAL follows three vloggers as they decide to work together on a project where they attempt to debunk a strange online story that’s going around about people being lost in time or disappearing when they go around a certain strange tree in the woods of Vancouver. What the trio find is that the stories may have more truth to them than they ever believed.
The leads are attractive, they are giving it their all, but you can tell there’s just not enough here for them to do. The core idea is interesting, and with the introdution of creepy sound effects it adds a really fascinating element that never really takes off. The film plays out in a very obvious way and we just have to sorta cast off logic as time passes without the sun seeming to go down – something that isn’t used for a scare so much as just ignored. This is the sort of movie that can’t rely on subtlety to make things come together, you need to up things and really lean into the weirdness of it. By the time the movie does it’s really too late and still feels like it’s not enough. The tone is all weird too, where even after one of the three disappears the others don’t seem as upset about it, or about what’s happening as they should be.
There’s some moments of good acting, and the ending has a sadness to it that you don’t get in a lot of these, but with no effort to explain anything, or to even tell us WHO or HOW someone found this ‘lost’ footage it feels like the filmmakers just used this subgenre and place as a stepping stone to other films and ideas. I don’t blame them. Ya gotta start somewhere. But the problem is that found footage, to do it well, is a lot harder than people realize. Yeah, anyone can pick up a camera and wander around and pretend there’s a ghost but unless there’s something special about how it’s made or what it is saying it mind as well just be a home movie.
I call this one a hard pass. I get what they were trying to do and hope that this was a huge stepping stone to more work or more works of passion but as it stands, this one is just a curiosity at best. I have seen far worse films, and there’s nothing offensive here at all, it just has nothing to say and keeps its secrets to itself.
1.5 out of 5
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 
Yeah, a theme isn’t enough, although this one sounds like it had a lot of potential. Maybe it was a decent learnign experience for them.
Woods can be great: beautiful and/or spooky or uncharted and connected to something vaster, and time-travel/realm overlap can be fascinating and/or menacing if there are tales or feelings about it. Nighttime–even twilight–in dense nature (especially when people are not used to it) has been scaring folks for millenia, but the ingredients have to be used. For example, a video based on my daily life (Spiritualist medium standing around indoors talking out loud to alleged spirits) would be frigging boring, since no one else sees the spooks, I am not great-looking enough to be hot on video, and there’s no risk of mayhem. Yawn. It’s what you do with the ingredients that makes a film absorbing or not–
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For sure. They had the elements of something interesting but just didn’t put it together for it to be compelling.
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Ah, somebody will do it better or worse next time!
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