This year’s Buffalo International Film Festival offered a program of horror films that opened with Alfred Hitchcock’s Pyscho. Shooting April, the first narrative feature by Tod Lancaster ends the evening. The film follows in a tradition spawned by Blair Witch Project, and copied countless times by quasi point-of-view “documentary” horror films, one of which is probably made in every undergraduate introduction to filmmaking.
The interesting thing regarding Shooting April is how complicit we are: our presence empowers the filmmaker and more than once I had considered walking out. I wish I had, the film does not earn the brutality it closes on simply because we have made enemies of all that are present – we are in the company of unlikable date rapists all around.
Shooting April is a pseudo documentary that provides us a group of guys who perform stunts for a website. Whereas we like the homoerotic antics of MTV’s Jackass and their cinematic endeavors, this group is repulsive. Part Girls Gone Wild, part Jackass lives are recorded with the vapid skill of a YouTube video, dizzyingly shot. If these people are meant to be “filmmakers” why do they handle the camera with the capacity of a 3-year-old?
Shooting April hits painfully familiar cords throughout the mundane story. I wouldn’t even want to stand in line at Starbucks with these jackasses, let alone spend a weekend in a cabin with them, as one character recommends. They provide no charm, written and acted like a parody of frat boys, making the whole thing a humorless and painful 73 minutes.
There have been equally painful and harrowing films in this genre with strong conceptual ideas at work, including Josh Fox’s spring break – turned Abu Grab travelogue Memorial Day and two recent “documentaries” that provide chilling effects – I’m Still Here and Catfish. There you have it: three titles that attempt what Shooting April does, all leaving you shaken without being intellectually offended.
1 out of 10