The Foxy Film Fan

The following review of Host  is spoiler free! As the coronavirus pandemic stretches on, filmmakers have found themselves struggling to find innovative ways to continue on in their craft. While movies like Searching  (which is fantastic, by the way) and Unfriended  attempted to provide stories via webcam footage and glimpses of a laptop interface, Host  does it out of necessity rather than due to a stylistic choice. Director Rob Savage uses the pandemic as a realistic backdrop for a relatively simple movie. Due to the technological limitations from actors being restrained to working from their webcams and Host's  devotion to realism, the movie is very brief. It's only 57 minutes long - the length of a free group Zoom call. However, the short length of the movie doesn't hold it back. In fact, it makes Host  a fast and fun horror movie for a season where we can't expect many new films. There's no unnecessary exposition, nor are there lengthy scenes to show us...

Spree  is a horror comedy with a simple premise: a driver for Spree (a fictional ride-share service similar to Uber or Lyft) is plagued with the desire for internet fame. He spends his free time streaming video games, making mediocre electronic music, and attempting to leech off of the fame of a friend. His entire life revolves around the unobtainable allure of going viral. One day he decides he's going to do whatever it takes to force the world to pay attention to him. Joe Keery from Stranger Things  is the driving force of the film. His greasy disheveled look and overeager neediness make for a fascinating watch from start to finish, and he's remarkably believable as a socially inept young man scrambling for the limelight. If anyone else was cast as Kurt the movie simply wouldn't be any good, because in the slower dull moments of the movie it's truly Keery's performance that kept me watching. Most of the fun in Spree  comes from the found footage style which it rew...

The Paranormal Activity  series has become infamous for its routine of constant jumpscares and its title has become somewhat synonymous with lazy popular horror which people will line up to see year after year on opening night. Admittedly, I am not a big fan of the series in terms of its convoluted storyline and difficulty with upholding simple historical accuracy in films and sequences which flash back to previous decades. However, bearing all of that in mind, I do firmly believe that Paranormal Activity (particularly the first film in the series) is extremely important to the horror genre as a whole, even with its glaring flaws and reliance on jumpscares, simply due to the fact that it made horror films something that were easily accessible and easy to create for those who initially believed they might not have the budget for it. Prior to Paranormal Activity  perhaps the most notable cheap horror movie was The Blair Witch Project  a film which might be unnerving ...

The Blair Witch Project (1999) Popularized by the film The Blair Witch Project  in 1999, the found footage genre is a sub-genre under the umbrella that is horror which is characterized by the fact that the film is meant to be regarded as though it is a documentation of true events, rather than a piece of art which can exist in its own universe. This small detail alone makes it clear that these found footage films are intended to survive based entirely on the novelty of this rather simple idea. Allow me to present my (not so) humble opinion: found footage films are horrible. For the most part, found footage is used as a lazy form of story telling. It allows a filmmaker to pay no attention to lighting, cinematography, or even sound design. Instead, for the most part, everything is excused based on the fact that the camera is being carried around by someone who probably isn't used to carrying one, leaving the footage so shaky it's sometimes hard to watch. This of course, ...