Frogman

 The United States is awash with cryptids: strange beasts that keep appearing in eyewitness reports, blurry photographs and the pages of Weekly World News, but have so far avoided capture or any other proper proof of their existence. You've got your superstars, of course: Sasquatch, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, the Dignified Kardashian, and the Chupacabra. But dig a little deeper, and there's a host of local celebrities, too: Skunk Ape, Ogopogo, Goatman... and the Loveland Frogman.

 I knew of all of these... except for that last one, the subject of 2023's Frogman, a very enjoyable take on that subgenre of found footage movies, the fake documentary.

 More than 20 years ago, the young Dallas Kyle, a HI8 Camcorder enthusiast, made national news  while on a family holiday when he caught footage of the Ohio-based cryptid peeking at him and his sister from the foliage

 Now a failed, middle-aged director of local obscurities who's reduced to living in his sister's guest room, Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk) is incensed to find some youtuber dipshit has dug up his old video to mock him. Determined to prove everyone wrong, he enlists the help of his friends Scotty (Benny Barrett) and Amy (Chelsey Grant) to go to Loveland for a weekend to make a documentary about Frogman. And to give the movie a visual identity, he resolves to shoot it entirely in his ancient Sony camcorder.

 The 'crew' arrive in town, interview the locals, get up to some very tame mischief, and find clues that things might be a little weirder than they seem.

 It's enjoyable, thanks to the fun characters and a persistent sense of oddness, but a little familiar (I got some heavy Willow Creek vibes more than once). Thankfully everything leads to a very enjoyable confrontation that includes quite a bit of the titular monster - obscured by blocking, camera shake, visual artifacts and plain old darkness, mind: we're talking about an extremely low budget production here.

 As cheap as it is, the whole sequence is inventive, varied, and while knowingly, extremely ridiculous, it takes itself seriously enough to avoid losing its sense of menace. Director Anthony Cousins crams it with incident and (very lo-fi) stylistic touches, not to mention a dollop of sculpted beasties and make-up effects. It also features someone saying "pollywog" in a context that made me laugh.

 The script (by the director and John Karsko) is very likeable - all three central characters are well rounded and fun to watch -  even if one of them is a stick in the mud. I can't say I ever cared about the romantic subplot, but the rest of their antics did make me chuckle a few times. The town of Loveland itself and the lore around its mascot also provides some appealing weirdness; Did I mention the Frogman has been known to wave a wand around, like a wizard?

 If I have to be honest, now I know that the Frogman-themed shop is a real tourist trap and not a near-miraculous feat of production design, I'm a little less enthused with the movie as a whole. But the scene there is still a lot of fun, and there's a few other cute little bits of local colour, like a surprisingly swole cutout of the Frogman for people to take their pictures with.

 I don't want to oversell this movie; As charming as they manage to make the characters, there's still plenty wasted time en route to the fireworks factory. It also, I'm sad to report, looks like absolute garbage - the choice of camera plus naturalistic lighting means that sometimes we can't see people's faces even in daylight shots. God knows why Dallas bothered to hire a cameraman.

 All this aside, it's a clear labour of love from a bunch of talented, enthusiastic people. FROGMAN WILL RETURN, the credits promise. I hope he does.

 

*: I am not proud of this, but it turns out running horror roleplaying games for a few decades makes you an expert in all sorts of useless knowledge.

Scare Package I & II

 The Scare Package movies are a couple of goofy low-budget horror comedies consisting of a bunch of skits tied together by a ridiculous framing device that ends up being a little more involved than that - I'd say the framing device takes up about a third or more of each movie. Their main thing is being very meta, and all about horror.

 The first movie starts very promisingly. The first sketch is about the guy who's going around in the background of the horror movies we watch, making it so that scary things can happen: he changes the road signs so that the tourists end up at the abandoned mental asylum, he cuts the lights when the babysitter is home alone, he rents out the house with the obvious ghost to the unsuspecting couple...  scene-setting, but within each movie's reality. It's a fun, clever concept, and they manage to take it to some respectably ridiculous places.

 Once that's done the framing device kicks in - it turns out this first sketch was somebody telling Chad, a video store owner about his idea for a movie (called, wait for it... 'Cold Open'). There's a new guy starting work at the store, so it's an excuse to show a couple more sketches - the second one is a doozy, a not particularly clever but very funny bit of mayhem about... Jesus, something about a weird lycanthrope and a serial killer going at it on a couple's retreat in the middle of the woods. It's a lot of fun, and boasts some pretty great gore.

 After that, unfortunately, it goes a bit downhill. The skits from there on range from merely ok to terrible, and the last forty minutes go back to the framing device, where the video store guy gets forcefully inducted into a sort of facility where scientists are studying an actual slasher. The slasher breaks free and starts murdering everyone, the good guys fall into horror 'types', with Chad the video store guy pointing out the tropes and shit. It's kind of fun, but it doesn't really have anything clever to say - all the ground it covers has already been covered, and better, a ton of times before.

 Now, humor of course is subjective, so I can see someone really enjoying this thing; on the other hand, a typical joke is someone getting graphically disembowelled and saying 'Owie'. So...

 All in all, I guess I'd describe it as 'cute'. You can turn it off after the first few skits, but the rest isn't that bad. I wish I could say the same about the sequel.

 Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge is an absolute pile of crap I would steer anyone away from, even people who loved the first one. It's a fucking joyless slog that didn't make me laugh a single time. It looks a bit slicker than the first one, more assured, but the contents - including the gore, which is nowhere near as memorable - are pretty cringeworthy. And while the first one was full of references, this one enshrines specific references as jokes. It's not quite as bad as a Friedman/Seltzer movie... wait, you know what? Yes, yes it is, exactly as bad. And I can think of no worse insult to a would-be-comedy.

 The only thing to recommend it is a British sketch that pastiches Re-Animator, Pet Cemetery and a couple other movies, but with pretty young kids as the protagonists and gets respectably gory. It's not great, but it's as good as it gets here, and gets a pretty good joke as the mom character says she's going to soundproof the basement for no reason.

 Oh, and there's a mildly funny spoof of Dr. Loomis in another sketch (that's itself a sequel to a sketch from the first movie.) And that's it. I've run out of nice things to say about this one.