I give The McPherson Tape credit for being an early example of a Found Footage horror movie. However, like most films of the genre, it’s a chore to watch. In most of these things, it feels like you’re watching someone else’s home movies. Well, this one starts exactly like someone else’s home movie with a guy filming his five-year-old niece’s birthday party. Eventually, he and his brothers go stumbling around in the woods with his camcorder and run afoul of visitors from another planet.
The opening crawl lets us know that the tape contains footage of an extraterrestrial encounter. The filmmakers do their best to mimic what such an encounter would look like with the obvious low budget and low-tech materials on hand. However, the fatal flaw remains: If this really was the first solid evidence of beings from outer space, would you really sit through all the shit with the little kid opening her birthday presents, blowing out her candles, her uncle futzing around in the dark trying to fix the fuse box, and long scenes of people wandering around in the dark, or would you cut all that unnecessary shit out and just get right to the aliens? I don’t know about you, but any movie that not only features a game of Go Fish in real time, but has a part where grandma has to EXPLAIN the rules of Go Fish is damn near insufferable.
I will say that the running time is scant (it’s only sixty-three minutes long), which helps The McPherson Tape go down a little smoother than some of the latter-day entries in the subgenre. What isn’t smooth is the atrocious herky-jerky shaky-cam camerawork, which is among the worst I have seen in a Found Footage flick. I mean if you’re gonna film man’s first contact with a UFO, you’d think you’d at least TRY to keep the camera still long enough to get a good look at them, but no. Another problem inherent in the genre is that a lot of scenes revolve around the annoying characters yelling obscenities at one another for minutes on end. These sequences get old fast and not even the occasional random alien cameo (Shyamalan must’ve watched this before making Signs) can do much to help rescue The McPherson Tape from the lower rungs of the genre.
AKA: UFO Abduction.
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