In between, I'll also cover some of the other stuff I've been watching because, as noted, there aren't that many Thanksgiving horror flicks out there in the first place. Please note that I've already covered the following: Home Sweet Home, Kristy, Thankskilling 1 & 3 (technically, there is no 2- read the article for details), Blood Rage, Blood Freak, and Eli Roth's Thanksgiving faux trailer. Click on the respective titles to read my thoughts on all of those films.
Oh, and just so you know, the following review is for a shot-on-VHS flick, so, while I tried to get the best quality pics for my article, they're inherently flawed from the jump because of the way they were shot and the low-budget nature of the film itself. My apologies for the graininess of the photos, but in this case, that really is just how it looked in the first place.
So, without further ado, let's get started with my first Thanksgiving terror title...
In the late 80's, young filmmaker Dean Alioto, was determined to make his first film before he was out of his twenties, just as some of his favorite filmmakers at the time had, such as Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Sam Raimi. To that end, he managed to secure $6,500 from a producer from a film company by the name of IndieSyndicate Productions. While the resulting film, UFO Abduction, received a limited release, disaster struck when the master copy of the film was destroyed in a fire, dooming its prospects to be given a proper home video release.
Saddened by this development, Alioto went back to the drawing board, trying to get another project off the ground, taking on a few TV directing gigs in the meantime. Then, a funny thing happened. Alioto got a call from someone wanting to know his connection to a video-tape of a real-life UFO encounter, which the caller had gotten a hold of at a convention.
It turns out that the distribution company had sent out VHS screeners of the movie at the time of its release, which had subsequently been bootlegged, sans credits, and advertised as the real deal, causing quite a stir at UFO conventions. The caller told him that various TV shows, including Unsolved Mysteries and Hard Copy wanted to do pieces on the footage, also thinking it was real. Alioto opted to go with FOX's Encounters, which he went on to debunk his own movie as a fake.
The widespread attention led to Dick Clark Productions offering Alioto a whopping $1.25 million to remake the film with better quality and professional actors- Alioto had just used local actors for the original, and shot the film directly on VHS tape. He did just that, redubbing the result Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, which aired on UPN in 1998- still a solid year before the infamous Blair Witch Project. (Though, to be fair, production on that film began in 1997, before its ultimate theatrical release in 1999.)
It was such a huge success that more footage was added to expand the film into a feature-length presentation, complete with various "experts" (played by actors, of course) attesting to the fact that the footage was absolutely real, one of which was played by Alioto himself, tongue firmly in cheek. Despite all this, true believers continued to allege that the original VHS footage was real, and that the remake was only made to "hide the truth" and was sanctioned by the government as a cover-up.
The resulting nonsense gave Alioto the full-fledged career he had always wanted in the first place, and the filmmaker and occasional actor has worked steadily ever since, notably on such made-for-TV work as the docudramas Lizzie Borden Had an Axe and Jesse James: Legend-Outlaw-Terrorist and the TV shows Watch Over Me (which he directed 66 episodes of) and Usual Suspects. He also directed the feature films Crashing Eden, L.A. Dicks, Shadowheart and this year's horror flick Portal, featuring legendary Scream Queen Heather Langenkamp, of Nightmare on Elm Street fame.
While not quite the first "found footage" horror flick- most fans cite the infamous Cannibal Holocaust as the pioneer in that respect, though it's not entirely in the true "found footage" style- it certainly preconfigured a lot of what would become the tropes of the subgenre moving forward. I mean, it's all there: the shaky camerawork (in the original film, it's by Alioto himself); the whole notion of filming long past most sane people would in light of what's transpiring around them; the barely-seen freaky events that we only catch fleeting glimpses of, leaving a lot of what happens to the viewer's imagination; the constant bickering amongst all the participants; and there's even a teary confessional towards the end in the remake- all elements that would crop up later on in the more famous Blair Witch Project.
The general idea in both iterations of the film is that someone is filming a specific event- in the original, it's a little girl's birthday; in the remake, it's a Thanksgiving reunion that brings everyone together for the first time in a while, after the death of the patriarch of the family- when the lights go out and the three brothers in the film go to investigate the fuse box outside to see what went wrong. While there, they hear a strange noise and see a freaky red light out in the woods and decide to check it out. (In the original film, this leads to lots of frenzied stumbling about in the woods, another BWP staple.)
The brothers then see what sure looks like a spaceship, and shortly thereafter, an alien seemingly eviscerating a cow before their horrified eyes. Then the alien looks up and sees them, signals to his cohorts, and, in the remake, even shoots one of the brothers with his laser. They get the hell out of dodge and race back to their house, imploring everyone to leave. Naturally, their family is decidedly skeptical, and hesitant to go anywhere, even when the boys get their guns out and start waving them around, paranoid that the aliens will show up at any minute.
The rest of the family manage to calm them down long enough to get a semi-coherent story out of them, and in the remake, the youngest brother, who is shooting everything with his camera, shows them the footage to drive home that it actually happened. Suitably convinced by it, everyone starts to get ready to leave when, naturally, an alien shows up. All hell breaks loose and one of the brothers manages to shoot the alien, which he unwisely brings inside, thinking he doesn't want to tip off the others that he killed one of their own.
Efforts to leave are thwarted nearly at every turn: one of the girls gets sick, seemingly struck by the same red laser as one of the brothers; a brother's truck's insides are demolished, preventing them from going anywhere in that vehicle; one of the guns is also rendered useless by the aliens; and needless to say, various members of the family keep freaking out, resulting in general mayhem throughout the film.
I also dug the weirdly Zen effect the alien presence had on the little girl, who not only draws a picture of the aliens without having actually seen them, but suddenly has the wherewithal in the remake to play the piano beautifully where she was just pecking around on it before. Even more ominously, when no one is looking, she unloads one of the shotguns, so that her family can't harm her new "friends." Honestly, the little girl freaked me out more than the aliens themselves, which are pretty clearly kids in costumes in both versions of the film.
That said, of the two versions, the first (UFO Abduction) does indeed seem more "real" than the other version, which is slicker and better-acted, with decent production values. Given that both versions featured a lot of improvisation on behalf of the actors- Alioto basically told everyone the general premise and signaled them as to when to freak out like something had happened, but otherwise let them literally make it up as they went along- the films both feel fairly realistic, and you do indeed forget at times you're watching a well-done fake. Albeit less so in the extended feature-length version (Alien Abduction), where the action keeps getting interrupted by talking head-style interviews.
Still, even that version gives the film an air of being an actual documentary using "real" footage, rather than the highly elaborate fake it actually is. Obviously, this very same approach would work like gangbusters with Blair Witch, which was also largely improvised, and was accompanied by- you guessed it- a TV documentary with various "experts" attesting to the legend of the Blair Witch, just to make it seem that much more real.
In addition, as with UFO Abduction and Alien Abduction alike, many people were also duped into thinking that The Blair Witch Project was the real deal- I know, because I witnessed it myself back in the day. A friend of mine secured a bootleg copy of BWP before it was released- I was in film school at the time- and we showed it to a bunch of our friends, telling them it was actual footage that had been found of some missing campers and they bought it, hook, line and sinker. Even when the film was officially released, enough people had seen it by then that there was no convincing them otherwise that it wasn't real.
In fact, just as with UFO/Alien Abduction, even when the filmmakers presented the actors in BWP as being very much alive and well, some people still didn't believe it and thought they were just look-alikes! It's funny how, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, some people, a la Fox Mulder, just "want to believe." I kind of envy those people sometimes, least of all in this current "fake news" climate we're living through at the moment. It must be nice not to believe that our planet is in mortal danger and we may well all be doomed if we don't act fast, or that our (not my) President is the only one that is willing to be a straight shooter and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. (Yeah, right.)
But it's still fun to pretend, and I'll allow that the approach taken by both films really makes it easy to do so. Alioto's approach was genius, and it just goes to show that some of the best ideas are born out of desperation. Because of Alioto's determination to make a film by any means necessary, he helped to create a subgenre that has made millions. Granted, Alioto didn't reap as much of the benefits as those who came after him, but we can at least rectify that by giving him some of the credit he deserves after the fact, which is better than nothing.
Hey, he did make a career out of it, which is something, and certainly better than nothing. It's more than a lot of people in his line of work can say. So, credit where credit's due, and be sure and check out Alioto's work for yourself. Both films are readily available on DVD, and you can watch the original UFO Abduction here on YouTube, at least at the time of this writing, along with loads of other videos supporting or debunking whether or not either film is the real deal or not, which is a fun wormhole to get lost in on a rainy day like today.
By all means, check this one out, in either incarnation- though, as I mentioned, the 50-minute remake sans the interview footage, as originally seen on UPN, is probably the best of the bunch. That one (spoiler alert) ends with cameraman seeing the alien and freezing in place, dropping the camera, which, obviously, is quite similar to the ending of Blair Witch.
However, the feature-length version- though it has all the interviews, which ruins some of the suspense- does have some fun additional scenes and an alternate ending, which is more in keeping with the original version, as the aliens (spoiler alert) come into the room and the remainder of the family first scream, then freeze, while one of the aliens points towards the camera and it goes dead, ending the film.
That said, the spell of the newer version may be broken somewhat by the presence of several familiar faces, including Entourage star Emmanuelle Chriqui as Renee; Benz Antoine, of Romeo Must Die and Get Rich or Die Tryin, as Matthew; Kristian Ayre (Elf, Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy) as Tommy, the cameraman; Gillian Barber (Jumanji, The X-Files, The Man in the High Castle) as Mom; Michael Buie (Grey's Anatomy, Inhumans) as Brian; Marya Delver (Sons of Anarchy) as Melanie and a few more where that came from.
It's still fun, no matter which version you watch, though. Although, if found footage films aren't your thing in the first place, this probably isn't going to change your mind. Especially as almost all the tropes are already present and accounted for, so it's not like, just because it was one of the first, and arguably one of the most influential, that makes it immune to a lot of people's arguments as to why the whole approach is ludicrous, more often than not.
Yes, it's hokey at times, and definitely low budget, and you absolutely will wonder why any sane person that was going through this sort of the thing would keep filming, but if you like found footage flicks, then you owe it to yourself to see the granddaddy of them all, and the one that clearly influenced most of the films that came after it, whether directly, or via second-hand versions like Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity.
By all means, check this one out, and I hope your Thanksgiving goes a lot better than the McPhersons!
🍗👽😱
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