3 out of 5

Directed by: Simon Glassman

You’ll have to pardon the non-review nature of this review. Or not. I’m going to wax on about a trend in contemporary found footage either way.

***

I floated back into watching Found Footage horror recently, which is how I stumbled across Buffet Infinity. Probably an adjacent genre in a way, but it’s brought to mind something that’s been nagging me with some more recent FF entries: that I’m getting old.

Perhaps this was inevitable: when I would be watching modern films (or shows, or etc.), and wondering if these kids know, or understand, what the art that they’re making is taking from. Now just by saying that, you can confirm that I am, indeed, getting old. But there’s some “I’m not that old” color to add to that – I think? – as Buffet Infinity isn’t wholly triggering get-off-my-lawn syndrome: I’d say I enjoyed it, and definitely respect the craft of it. In addition, it’s possible co-writer / director Simon Glassman is of my same age range, which is hard to reconcile with my forthcoming criticism…

…The modern found footage “romanticizes” the VHS-documented era from which it sprang (or the Blair Witchiness that kicked it off in more earnest, anyway). I feel like this effect actually started to creep in from Youtube, as series like Marble Hornets further-enabled / evolved the online creepypasta / ARG niche, continually re-tapping the youth demo to perpetuate the myths and What Ifs from yesteryear; combined with an ongoing need for media preservation, we get an offshot obsession with “lost media” appealing to that same youthy demo: and thus the romanticization of the mystery of things those hunting for them never necessarily directly experienced. VHS just became equated with home movies and funny commercials; it’s always shitty quality with a date timestamp and a local access TV vibe.

I recognize that you don’t have to live through something to come to appreciate it, and there’s no shade intended toward those who are interested in stuff from the 80s and 90s just because they’re from an earlier, odd-seeming generation – certainly that type of cultural recycling has been a thing for a long-ass time. But here’s the “I’m not that old” argument: I’ve always been skeptical or those who copy and paste the past to the present. When I was a teen, I was triggered by bands who were just knocking off glam rock; as a young adult, it was synthwave knocking off the 80s – both in movies and music. It’s not all examples of this, because, again, we’ve always been doing that; it is – also again – the copy and paste without trying to (purposefully or not) reinvent it. That either results in something very hollow, or something that inevitably brings in modern influences while the creator is in some denial of that. That can result in some interesting but kind of conceptually flawed curios where the artist – in my mind – has difficulty actually defining what their art is trying to say. (And prevaricating yet again, we don’t need to know that; “natural” inspiration is a thing; but I think it’s a valuable exercise to at least think about what your art means.)

So: we’re now down a generation+ rabbit hole of some curios of this nature in found footage – romanticized representations that don’t fully glean on the Why of the representation – and now projects that are inspired by those same curios.

Meanwhile, you’re watching Buffet Infinity and chuckling at its 90 minutes of faux commercials that start to form an interconnected story about an emerging / re-emerging alien persona, taking over a small town.

***

I do think the framework for this movie is utterly lovely, combining the late night TV shtick of Tim & Eric with the absurdist horror of Too Many Cooks, told in a mockumentary fashion: BI flits from commercial to commercial every 15 or 30 seconds, with revisits of an insurance company, a lawyer, a pawn shop, separate ads from two feuding restaurants, news reports on an expanding sinkhole, and others starting to build out the aforementioned story. We break, slightly, from this convention as things get more and more twisted, but to wrap around to the exhaustive blabber above, I never quite connected the conceit of the film with its depictions; that is, I was never all-in on the anti-comedy vibes of the ads, or caught up by the Unknown spookiness of the story. All pieces felt affected by the aforementioned romanticization-without-understanding: either of the VHS-era vibes visually espoused by the footage, the public access content being parodied, or even the meta nature of the storytelling: all arrive with a slight remove. There are so many great touches (like the overdubs making dialogue slightly off), but those sit beside the movie not quite knowing if its absurdist comedy or horror or art project, ultimately getting in the way of finding the ideal approach for being effective.