Thanks for spoiling the movie. Assholes. See the alien face on the box? There's the movie; it's aliens. I hate when movies spoil themselves. Like Yor: The Hunter from the Future. Spoiler in the fucking title of the movie and on the box art too.
He's not really a caveman , he's... Blast Hardcheese!
The audience, or at least the observant members of it, already know the ending. So, the film has to interest or provide a bit of suspense to keep us watching. It doesn't do this either. Hunter Dad is going to make an educational (?) hunting video to distribute at Wal-Mart. I'm not sure if he has some sort of contract with Wal-Mart or he's just hoping they are in need of some more crap to add to their bargain bin. He gets his wife's ex-husband to invest in his project after showing him his super-duper amazingly fantastic new invention: a bicycle helmet with a camera attached. Add a flashlight on it and he could hunt in caves! Amazing! Hunter Dad and Wife hire Surly Cameraman to film their expedition, but Wife is a bitch and immediately has a problem with him even though he hasn't shown his Surly side yet. They talk shit about him while he eavesdrops with his camera audio equipment. Later, he gets drunk and breaks the fourth wall while bad-mouthing everyone alone in his basement. There's also son of Wife, Wimpy Kid. He's wimpy because he wears glasses. He doesn't really want to go hunting with his step-dad, but, unfortunately for Wimpy Kid, Hunter Dad only had enough funds to make a bike helmet camera to fit kids. Oh, and he can't afford a pack mule either, so Wimpy Kid gets to carry all their shit.
They take off to the woods, but on the way stop at a diner to order PANCAKES! from a mentally challenged guy. Guy talks ominously about the local hunting grounds, but I kind of lost consciousness at this point from humming dueling banjos so furiously. When I woke up they were being menaced by another "special" local at the hunting grounds. Did I mention the third first-person POV yet? Well, this movie just likes to spoil itself so much that all these hunting scenes are inter-cut with scenes of Wife's ex-husband and his wife searching for the group. These two handle the third first-person camera, saying things like "We are making this tape so when we find you, you can watch this later and see how we did it." Hey, after you get over your frightening experience of being lost in the woods let's watch the tape I made about rescuing you. Later, in these scenes but before anything interesting has happened in the hunting scenes, the kid and the other POV tapes are found and the search is called off. The couple then goes around filming people who may have been involved in the disappearance (the two locals) in some sort of amateur investigation because they think there is some sort of conspiracy. However, WE don't know there is supposed to be some sort of conspiracy because the hunting scenes haven't gotten there yet.
In the hunting scenes, Hunter Dad and Surly Cameraman follow John Cusack's example of what to do when you are with your kids and see an ominous fence that screams "No trespassing." They trespass under (a hole has been dug) the fence with BARBED WIRE FACING IN (to keep something inside! Oh no!) to see if there are more deer to shoot for their video. They screw around in the woods, trying to shoot a deer and failing. At one point the pack mule Wimpy Kid tumbles down a hill with exposed tree roots sticking out and no one seems to really give a shit apart from "Hey, don't fuck up our stuff!" Now, the film is trying to make Surly Cameraman out to be an asshole, but Hunter Dad is supposed to be a good guy. I'm not saying he should coddle the little snot, but he's already carrying all your shit on a hunting trip he didn't care to be a part of where you dragged him into an area that just screamed danger. You can at least help him back up the hill. Hunter Dad makes up for his inadequacies by giving the kid a nuclear-powered compass. Maybe the dad thought he was being cute or something, but I'm pretty sure compasses are magnets and have no reason to be nuclear-powered. It's obviously not nuclear-powered, but a regular magnetic compass, when then find themselves in a false North that causes the needle to go all wonky. The area looks like a baby Stonehenge with bidets instead of stones and piles of fire ant killer.
The group decides they should get out of there because maybe that "No trespassing" sign did have a point. They find a campground and a prison issue slipper and really start to get freaked that maybe there is an escaped prisoner or something, but decide to stay overnight instead of getting the fuck out of there. They have flashlights, why not just keep going? Surly Cameraman is surly and drinks from a small flask for over two hours. I forgot to mention that this movie really likes timestamps. Every ten minutes we get a tap-tap-tap timestamp telling us the date (including the day) and the time. The movie takes place mostly during one day so it gets a little redundant to see: OCTOBER 16, SATURDAY 10:22 AM … OCTOBER 16, SATURDAY 10:34 AM typed out.
Then Surly Cameraman takes off with his camera for a little Blair Witch running through the woods shaky cam. I don't know why he ran off though. Maybe he heard the vehicles coming for Hunter Dad and kid, though that happens some time later. Everyone runs off, but meets up again at bidet Stonehenge where Menacing Local # 2 tells them he's sorry but he has to do this but he's glad they have cameras blah blah. It's obvious the government is in on it. Menacing Local # 2 dumps deer piss on Wimpy Kid and tells him to run off with the tapes. He falls down and his camera helmet comes off and somehow gets turned around so we can see the kid's face in a snotty nose "I'm so scared right now" scene. FINALLY the aliens show up and kill the adults, but I guess they don't like deer and just sniff the kid with their fingers. The aliens are actually kind of cool, but it was completely unnecessary to show them in as much detail as the movie did. I think it's scarier not to show them.
Wife's ex-husband has the tapes and has been studying them. In a non sequitur conversation with his wife about how the maid Conchita must have stopped being lazy and started really cleaning he realizes that there's no way a woman with a Hispanic sounding name would really do her job! The government has broken in and cleaned his house and bugged him! If the government broke in and trashed his house to get the tapes, I would think they would just make it look like a robbery rather than wasting time cleaning. So, Wife's ex-husband GOES TO THE GOVERNMENT with a file o' proof complete with a perfect picture of one of the aliens. I think the picture would have been enough, and more effective than the other scene where everyone gets killed. The government agent at the UFO Bureau says he'll help, but shreds that shit as soon as the dude walks out. Then, he and his wife die due to complications from a car accident.
Overall, it's a fairly inoffensive movie and a mediocre fake documentary. It's thankfully not as over the top with its "THIS SHIT IS SO REAL AND BASED ON A TRUE STORY!" like The Fourth Kind was. It's poorly thought out and can't quite decide if it wants to be a first-person POV movie or a regular third-person POV movie. The two POV's don't mesh well and hinder the story telling. The hunt scenes and the search scenes with Wife's ex don't mesh either. The search scenes end up being pretty pointless. They could have told the story linearly, had the kid and tapes found, and then had Wife's ex-husband go to the government with his proof. Instead we get this cutting back and forth that ends up spoiling any surprises the hunt scenes had to offer. Not that the whole fucking movie wasn't spoiled already by the box art.
