Director: Corey Grant
Starring: Drew Rausch, Ashley Wood, Rich McDonald, Noah Weisberg, Frank Ashmore
Running Time: 95 Mins
Certificate: 18.
Synopsis: A budding TV journalist and his crew set out to the lost coast of North California to meet a man who claims to possess the body of a dead Sasquatch, and in doing so, disprove the existence of Bigfoot. But what they discover may be more then just a simple hoax…
Another month, another ‘found footage’ movie. Until now, the genre has mostly seen dedicated (i.e. idiotic) folks, armed with recording devices, going off in search of witches, ghosts, zombies, and even trolls, only to be horribly killed. Now it’s the turn of the elusive Bigfoot to get some shaky-cam screen-time. Except…well, he doesn’t…
And thus we have the fundamental flaw with THE LOST COAST TAPES – we see nothing! Now I know some people will say that’s way more scary, leaving it up to the audience’s imagination, but when a film such as this slowly builds tension for what seems like forever, in order to set up some terrifying payoff, it’s a huge disappointment when that payoff fails to happen. We spend pretty much most of the film hearing about the Bigfoot, and occasionally hear it in the dark woods. But that’s pretty much it. When members of the ragtag film crew start to get offed, we don’t see what’s doing it or how it’s doing it. Instead, we get some screams, some blood splatter, then nothing. There’s no final result whatsoever, apart from in the final minute, which sees the entire plot take a leftfield turn that both confuses and enrages more then it scares. It’s a major disappointment.
The actual found footage is also a load of old bobbins. The opening ten minutes look and feel more like an episode of THE OFFICE then they do THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and the film falls into the trap that other recent found footage movies – like CHRONICLE did also – in that it runs out of legitimate reasons for the characters to have a camera in their hands early on, and yet continues to go down the found footage route, with the characters filming everything as if the camera were somehow a part of their anatomy.
Coupled with some bad performances, flat and uninspiring direction, and a script that decides in the final moments that it just can’t be bothered anymore, THE LOST COAST TAPES is just plain BLAIR WITCH-wannabe rubbish. When the creepiest thing about the film is the poster/DVD artwork, there’s no denying that the film itself is a major disappointment!
THE LOAST COAST TAPES is available on DVD now.
