The Found Footage Festival (Vol. 3, 2008)

The Found Footage Festival
Currently Touring the Country

If you are tired of those film festivals featuring good films? Would you rather watch a film festival filled with videos found at thrift stores and garage sales? Then the Found Footage Film Festival is for you.

This festival, organized and hosted by Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, features a bunch of videos so bad they are good, which means they are horribly bad. It's not unlike staying up late and watching Public Access anywhere. There are many such films organized into categories like How To, Training Video Footage and The Best of Harassment.

All the films have been edited to bring you the most unintentionally hilarious bits. Which, if you are a purist and like to watch terrible videos from start to end, then you may be disappointed. If you are the type of person who has a life, then this is perfect. Also, it since this is a festival it helps to keep the overall show to two hours.

Some videos are improved a lot by editing, such as the Best of Harassment, where Sexual Harassment educational videos are edited just to show what not to do. Also, in the case where an Angela Lansbury workout video is edited to be shorter - merciful.

This is not to say that there isn't a whole lot of disturbing videos to see. Certainly not for children.

In addition to the unintentionally hilarious vidoes there are some intentionally produced satirical videos by Mr. Pickett and Mr. Prueher. The funniest one is a fake public access show "Talkin' Beards" which guest stars Chris Elliot, and involves -- well, I'm sure you can figure it out.

If you go to the show, you can pick up a DVD of the videos in the festival for ten dollars. Which is a nice little thing to take home and disturb the family with.

This particular showing of the festival was witnessed by me at the very fine Loft Cinema in Tucson, Arizona.