Reel Monsters (2022)

How incompetent is this movie? Two characters roaming the woods (there is a lot of woods-roaming here) separately are conversing via walkie-talkie, when one of them, whom we never see, marvels that “All the birds … they stopped making noise”; the other one, who is onscreen, confirms that “here too” – except that the soundtrack is all a-twitter with chirping noises. D’oh!

This occurs “40 Years Earlier”. Earlier than what is not clear until we switch to the “Present Day”, so I guess what they meant was “40 Years Ago”. Curiously, there is a Wonder Years-style narration provided by an older, future version of the protagonist, which of course means that the “Present” is also the past.

The protagonist’s name is Cory, an amateur filmmaker – not unlike the director of Reel Monsters – who says that “Right now, I'm kind of French New Wave meets the Ramones. Not sure that's anybody's thing.” For the sake of clarification, let me assure you that that’s nobody’s thing, because it isn’t even a thing at all.

Cory joins his new school’s film club, and if there ever was a group of people who needed to stay behind the camera, it’s this bunch of Breakfast Club wannabes. Actually, not a single person appearing in this debacle has any business being in front of a camera, at least not “acting”. Just to mention a pair of examples, there’s one of the aforementioned characters who can’t for the life of him stop rocking back and forth while walkie-taking. Or the inflection-less bully who says things like “Don't turn your back on us you'll be sorry for turning your back on us” in one non-stop breath, and utters the phrase “Third time lucky” as if it were an actual saying (my guess is he meant to say ‘third time’s the charm’).

However, there is a very small possibility that all this ineptitude is deliberate; perhaps its purpose is to progressively and steadily lower the audience’s expectations, so that when the “creature” rears its ugly – and I mean ugly – head, our senses will be too dull and our brain too numb to protest a supposed Bigfoot-like beast which by comparison makes the Patterson–Gimlin film seem like a paragon of realism.