Combine “The
Blair Witch Project” with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and you’ve got
the gist of freshman director Justin Barber’s found-footage, sci-fi, horror
chiller “Phoenix Forgotten” (* OUT OF ****), involving an alleged UFO sighting
in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday, March 13, 1997. “Maze Runner” scenarist
T.S. Nowlin and Barber have appropriated that larger-than-life incident known
as “Phoenix Lights” for their superficial saga about three teens who took off
into the desert to document this phenomenon with a camcorder.
Unfortunately, they vanished without a trace, but left behind their camcorder.
For the record, “Phoenix Lights” made national headlines, and experts
have described as it as “the most widely seen mass UFO sighting in US history,”
second only to the renowned Roswell UFO crash in 1947. Nevertheless, I’m
fed up with low-budget, found-footage thrillers as uninspired as “Phoenix
Forgotten.” They neither make my skin crawl nor make me feel sympathetic
about the plight of characters too asinine to know better. Basically, the
actors and actresses play stock characters, with little aside from biology and
apparel to differentiate them. Neither the original (and extremely
overrated) “Blair Witch Project” (1999) nor its abysmal 2016 remake did little
to arouse either my curiosity or raise my hackles. Mind you,
found-footage movies aren’t all awful. The Vietnam war epic “84 Charlie
Mopic” (1989) was one of the best. “The Paranormal Activity” franchise
has been consistently gripping. You may have your favorites, too. Nothing
in “Phoenix Forgotten” will make you gnaw your fingernails, unless you’ve never
watched a horror movie. Furthermore, this formulaic film features
pedestrian performances by unknown thespians without a bit of charisma who were
cast largely for their ordinary, inconspicuous looks. Nowlin & Barber
have forged characters that aren’t interesting for their own sake, and their
dialogue isn’t quotable. Worse, the film doesn’t spring any surprises that
would make you scream. The first half of “Phoenix Forgotten” is dreary
enough to lull you into a stupor. The marginally better second half
struggles to compensate for the somnambulance of its monotonous first
half. The convenient found-footage sequences are predictably designed to
trouble you with lots of wobbly camera work with sporadically scrambled video
imagery.
Sophie
(Florence Hartigan of “Magik and Rose”) has returned to her hometown of Phoenix.
She plans to produce a documentary film about her older brother Josh (Luke
Spencer Roberts of “Hail, Caesar!”) and his two friends, Ashley (Chelsea Lopez
of “Novitiate”) and Mark (newcomer Justin Matthews), who got lost in the desert
20 years ago while making their own documentary about the “Phoenix Lights.”
Josh had been a videophile for years.
The first time that we see Josh, he is recording his younger sister
Sophie’s sixth birthday party when mysterious lights illuminate the skies over
Phoenix. Local television stations broadcast reports about the suspected
UFOs, while public officials stage a press conference with a guy masquerading
as an extraterrestrial to defuse the paranoia surrounding the sightings.
The UFO coverage whetted Josh’s curiosity, and he started shooting interviews
with anybody who had either witnessed or heard about the unidentified flying
objects over Phoenix. Naturally, the military discredited those UFO
sightings. Indeed, Air Force officials issued a statement that aircraft
on training maneuvers had deployed flares that would have resembled a UFO.
When
Sophie comes home, she interviews her parents, who have been divorced because
the search for their son devastated their marriage, as well as Josh’s friends
to find closure. Sophie and her cameraman are about to call off their
documentary when a high school librarian discovers a package stashed in the
school’s storage facility. The package contains another camcorder with a
cassette cartridge in it. Sophie’s hopes soar when she learns that not
only can the tape still play but also that Josh shot the footage. All
along everybody, including local law enforcement, could never adequately
explain why Josh would have left behind his camcorder in his vehicle. The
revelation is that Josh had two camcorders! Sophie lends the footage to a
military official to examine. He warns Sophie that she shouldn’t show
that tape to anybody. The remainder of “Phoenix Forgotten” concerns what
Josh and his friends recorded after they plunged into the desert. The
three wind up lost, and tempers flare as they struggle to find their way back
to Josh’s SUV. After they get back on the road to Phoenix, Arizona,
something with a glaring light approaches them from behind and overtakes them.
Inexplicably, Josh’s vehicle conks out, and the three set out on foot on a
lonely highway. Before long other mysterious things occur, and they are
swept up in turbulent winds, explosive sounds, and bright lights.
Presumably,
producer Ridley Scott, who directed the original “Alien,” must have felt that
teen audiences afflicted with ADDH would mob the multiplexes and parlay this
$2.8 million feature into a weekend blockbuster, like “The Blair Witch
Project.” The trouble with Barber’s film is that he takes too long to
establish both the characters and set up the predicament. Unfortunately, the
filmmakers wear us out keeping track of a lot of insignificant details about
the characters and their environment designed to enhance the plausibility of
“Phoenix Forgotten.” The staccato editing stresses the spontaneity of the
moment, but Barber neglects to align our sympathies with those characters.
As the chief protagonist of “Phoenix Forgotten,” Sophie searches desperately to
determine what became of her ill-fated sibling. Incredibly, “Phoenix
Forgotten” partially duplicates the plot of a 1989 micro-budgeted,
straight-to-video epic entitled “UFO: Abduction.” The big brother in the
latter film is taping his niece’s fifth birthday with a hand-held camera when
UFOs blasted out of nowhere. Afterward, the hero and his two brothers
rushed into the woods to investigate their sighting. They located the
flying saucer and encountered three aliens. Frantically, the brothers
withdrew to their house, and the aliens besieged them. Predictably,
Josh’s found footage suggests that aliens abducted the trio. Altogether,
“Phoenix Forgotten” is best forgotten as just another crackpot conspiracy
theory orchestrated with little imagination.
