The Poughkeepsie Tapes Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Coming up on the new year, it's interesting to see which films we had thought would've been released by this point. In the summer of 2007, I recall myself and several colleagues showing up for a press screening of Jonathan Levine's lauded slasher, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, only to discover it was canceled just that morning and the film had been sold from the Weinstein Company to Senator that afternoon. (The film has since landed at Sony, whose indie arm, Sony Classics, already saw Levine's follow-up, The Wackness, to a proper theatrical reception.)

At least the Weinsteins gave something up for a change. The oft-shuffled Killshot and Fanboys are tentative January and February releases at the moment, respectively, and I just want to see for myself if The Poughkeepsie Tapes has been worthy of its modest reputation following a BNAT '07 screening -- the same BNAT that featured the reportedly sweet Trick 'r Treat that WB continues to hoard.

A perhaps more morbid curiosity has me keeping an eye on Paramount's Case 39, just to see if it's really that bad, and who knows what similar straits Assassination of a High School President, The Accidental Husband (originally last March), and Possession (originally last February) are in following Yari Film Group's bankruptcy -- not that I have much invested in the last two, but Assassination is a perfectly release-worthy noir take-off that deserves a home.

So what do you guys and girls think? Which of these are you most dying to see? What was the longest you ever waited to catch something, and were you ultimately disappointed or satisfied by the time it came your way?

The big talk of the past couple days is the overtly hostile audience reaction that greeted The Poughkeepsie Tapes at Harry Knowles' Butt-Numb-A-Thon this past weekend. For those who haven't seen it, Poughkeepsie is a horror-mockumentary, a "found footage" movie like The Blair Witch Project, in which we're told about and shown clips from the 'found' video library of a prolific serial killer who terrorized Poughkeepsie, NY for years. At BNAT, the audience greeted the film with boos and hisses and the mood was so hostile that a planned Q&A with the filmmakers was cancelled on the spot. Today, AICN and other sites are running advance reviews that spoil the movie's secrets and trash it as a completely failed project.

Here's where I come into this -- I saw The Poughkeepsie Tapes at Tribeca and I enjoyed it, but only because I was seeing it on a completely different wavelength than the filmmaker. You see, the director actually thinks his movie works as a faux-documentary. He thinks the audience is fooled. Not only is it not fooled, but when watching the film at Tribeca I never even imagined a serious attempt was being made to trick me into thinking this was real. It was only later, when I conducted an exclusive interview with John Dowdle, that this came to light. See, I thought it would be perfectly okay to talk about the film not being real during the interview, and I happily pointed out all the 'cues' that clued me to the fact that it was phoney. This caused John great agita and weeks after the interview was published, I started getting frantic, panicked emails from the film's publicity people asking me to cut out the passages where I talked frankly about the film being fictional.

John, get a new marketing team. No human being with a third-grade education or higher is fooled into thinking your movie is a legit documentary. Again, I didn't even know I was supposed to think that. But the point is that I didn't care -- I thought the movie actually worked as a horror-comedy and I gave it a positive review, and I certainly wasn't the only one. That's the direction to spin this thing. Otherwise, you're just pissing people off by insulting their intelligence.

As the gift giving season approaches, I've decided to give myself a present and indulge in a handful of trailers for movies whose only connection to each other is that I've been looking forward to them. This week on Trailer Park, it's all about me.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes
I've seen some grumbling online about how this pseudo documentary has similarities to The Blair Witch Project which in turn owed a debt to Cannibal Holocaust and The Last Broadcast. No, there's nothing new under the sun, but what matters is the execution (an unfortunate choice of words in this case). The film is built around footage supposedly shot by a serial killer who wanted to record his crimes for posterity. There are two trailers floating around, the one at Youtube which you can link to at the top of this paragraph, and this one. Both show news reports of the murders, documentary style interviews, and grainy VHS quality footage of the crimes. It looks pretty disturbing, and I hope to see this when it releases sometime in 2008. Ryan Stewart reviewed the film when it played Tribeca and you can read that here.

Semi Pro
I have to qualify this one by saying I was looking forward to it before seeing the trailer, but now I'm not so sure. Will Ferrell plays Jackie Moon, a coach/basketball player in the 1970s. The league he plays in is about to be absorbed by the NBA, and Moon is determined that his team will survive the transition. Not sure if Ferrell is running out of steam or if I am, but I'm left feeling lukewarm about this one. We've seen him do 70s schtick in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and this is his third sports themed film (fourth if you count the kid oriented Kicking and Screaming), so I guess I'm a little tired of him repeating himself. Stranger Than Fiction was a nice change of pace for Ferrell, and I'd like to see more of that. Still the bit in Semi Pro with the bear is pretty good. Here's Christopher Campbell's take on the trailer.

After seeing the much talked-about mockumentary The Poughkeepsie Tapes at this year's Tribeca, I had a chance to speak with John Dowdle, the film's director. We did the interview by phone, and I may have also been in the presence of his brother and collaborator Drew Dowdle -- the two are making their bones in the business as 'The Dowdle Brothers' -- but if that's the case, he didn't really make himself known and I don't know that he piped up to answer any of my questions. If he wants to contact me to correct, he can. John and I talked about a number of subjects, including the making of the film, the reception at Tribeca, the current atmosphere for horror films in general, and what's up next for the brothers. If you haven't seen the film yet, the less you know going in the better, so you might want to hold off reading reviews and interviews until afterwards. But otherwise, here's our talk -- enjoy.


Did you guys actually go to Tribeca with the film this year?

JD: Absolutely, absolutely.

I saw it at a public screening on Wednesday night, and the audience seemed to respond to it pretty well.

JD: Yeah, it's gotten a great reaction. We've really had a wonderful time here, with the film. The audiences really seem to connect with it.

I think a lot of the audience, at least at my screening, didn't really catch on that it was a faux documentary until that last scene.

JD: Honestly, we really struggled very hard to make everything as realistic as we possibly could, and obviously as the film goes on. The killer stuff is super realistic, very clean realism. And as it goes, it gets more and more surreal. We figured we would have earned that, later in the film, but we struggled very, very hard to keep everything as absolutely realistic as we could. We've actually had reviewers not realize its fictional until the Q&A.

Shot in a strict documentary style, The Poughkeepsie Tapes recounts the story of the Water Street Butcher, a serial killer who terrorized Poughkeepsie, NY for over ten years starting in the early 90s. Eventually the butcher made a minor slip-up and several battalions of SWAT came calling, but he was already long gone when they arrived. Instead, what they found in his abandoned house was an enormous, meticulously cataloged library of VHS tapes in which he had documented his entire career in murdering. The Poughkeepsie Tapes winds its way through the killer's story by giving us interviews with cops, FBI agents and the friends and family members of the victims, and also includes extended clips from the actual video library, so we can see exactly what happened to the victims, not just leave it to imagination. Needless to say, this is all bullcrap. The Poughkeepsie Tapes is the new Blair Witch, a carefully constructed piece of faux realism -- the longer it goes on, the more obvious it becomes, but I'm happy to say that doesn't detract from the fun.

The killer's M.O. changes randomly throughout his career -- a calculated move to throw the authorities off the scent -- but torture of some kind is almost always on the agenda. In one horrifying scene, we see -- through the aged, shaky footage of his personal camcorde, as always -- him pickup a woman who needs a lift to a gas station. By the look of his car and his helpful demeanor, she takes him for a plain clothes police officer and agrees to ride in the back seat. Little details like her unexplained British accent help sell the setup, and after they've driven a while, it becomes clear that he isn't taking her to any gas station. "Let me ask you something ..." he finally asks. "What made you think I was a police officer?" Cut to one of the numerous scenes of torture in the killer's dank, greenlit basement hellhole. The victim is usually hogtied or chained and gagged, while the killer toys with them by wearing a scary Comeddia dell'arte mask and asking questions like "Are you happy that I killed your family?"