Spook du jour

Directed By: Anonymous
Written By: Anonymous
Released: 2016
Runtime: 67 Minutes
Watch this on: Shudder

The Phoenix Tapes ’97 is an independent found footage horror movie that details the final days of four campers who disappeared the night of an infamous, conspiracy-ridden phenomenon known as the Phoenix Lights.

Well, if you look above here you’ll notice that the information portion of this review is a little bit thin. This isn’t for lack of effort, though, because there is literally no information on who directed or wrote this. The people who put this out were so dedicated to its found footage credibility that they anonymously released it, stating “This was banned from all theaters and only Amazon Prime would show the video.” My suspicion is that no theaters would show it because it just isn’t very good. This movie is essentially The Blair Witch Project but it takes place in the desert, and instead of a witch, the people are dealing with aliens. The movie is supposed to take place in 1997 so the video camera quality is super grainy, and that makes the night vision-running shots a real mess to try and follow. Also, the wind is wreaking havok on the camera’s microphone for most of it which makes for very distorted sound. I’d love to tell you that the aliens were super cool or bad ass looking, but you get two glimpses of them so you can’t really make out what they look like. I should have known what I was getting myself into when I paused it and found the runtime clocks in at a whopping 67 minutes, but then again the short runtime was my favorite thing about this one.

I do not recommend this movie unless you wanna see the desert, some dudes walking around in the desert, some dudes frantically running in the desert at night, or if you have ever thought, “Man, The Blair Witch Project would have been so much cooler if it was in the desert, shot almost exclusively through night vision, and had like two quick scenes with aliens.”

Grade: 2/10