For a time, found footage movies were the dominant form of horror. It was a brief run, but an impactful one with a lasting legacy, and now and then, you get another film trying to do what “The Blair Witch Project” accomplished a quarter-century ago. It’s those many failed endeavors that leave the subgenre open to mockery, ironically, from yet another polarizing subgenre—the mockumentary. But as the saying goes, “We kid because we love,” and the best mockumentaries come from people who have a genuine love for what they ridicule. That’s something you can feel with “Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project,” which was clearly made with love. Inspired by the humor of Christopher Guest comedies, found footage horrors, and “cabin in the woods”-style scares, it’s a deliciously unhinged mix that works more often than it doesn’t.
Notably, “Patterson Project,” the movie within this movie, is executive produced by Radio Silence, the filmmaking duo behind a pair of “Scream” films, “Abigail,” and more. They are the model to follow for upstart horror directors looking to grow from indie film festival darlings to studio blockbusters. That’s exactly the kind of career trajectory ambitious but overwhelmed Chase (Brennan Keel Cool) wants for himself. He’s determined to complete his feature debut, a found footage film about Bigfoot. With minimal resources, an untested cast and crew, an accidental shooting, an Alan Rickman scam, a Daniel Radcliffe miscue, and assorted paranormal activity, the shoot is destined to go gleefully off the rails.
The chaos of making movies is the real horror of “Patterson Project,” and part of the fun is how common hurdles spin wildly out of control and become something too monstrous to handle. A deceptive casting director offers them Leonardo DiCaprio’s fling before his most recent fling, before settling on Danielle Radcliffe (almost the Harry Potter guy) as the film’s star. The production is bankrolled by a guy who sells furniture, and to secure the rest of the budget, they lie to a senile benefactor that her favorite actor, the late Alan Rickman, has been cast and that she can meet him. The Bigfoot costume’s skin feels too “scrotum-like,” the catering is rotten, and the timeshare cabin they’re staying at might be haunted. What’s more, hunting season comes into play with violent consequences.
There’s a surprising amount of depth to “Patterson Project,” in that it’s not just a movie about a doomed horror project. A French documentary team is shadowing them, and as the production begins to fall apart due to creative and supernatural problems, the film becomes both a mockumentary and an actual horror flick. To be fair, it works better the more it leans into laughs than frights, which are too cheesy to be taken seriously. Director and co-writer Max Tzannes effortlessly transitions between formats, incorporating behind-the-scenes documentary footage, interviews with the crew, and actual scenes of the unfolding chaos.
What’s great about the writing and the ensemble cast performing it is how there’s a balance between the ridiculous circumstances, the horrors of being part of such a low-budget affair, and then the sheer terror of something possibly demonic. When dealing with a production of this size, the smallest problems snowball into absolute madness. You won’t find any big names as part of the cast, but there are a few potential stars in the making. Cook might look like a body double for “Napoleon Dynamite,” but his portrayal of Chase’s unshakeable confidence bordering on cluelessness is really funny. The scene stealer is Erika Vetter as the first assistant director and Chase’s girlfriend, Natalie, who slowly grows frustrated at being disrespected and ignored until she’s ready to start exploring other options, possibly with the film’s stoic producer, Mitchell (Chen Teng).
The jokes don’t always land, and some of them happen at the wrong time, diffusing some of the more tense predicaments. The pacing can be sluggish, particularly before the shoot actually begins. But once the cameras are rolling, “Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project” does a good job of capturing the limitations placed on creative ambition by low-budget filmmaking and the mad scrambles that ensue.
