In our quest to maybe eventually one day review all the dinosaur films ever made, i had to wonder if we missed something.
We features dinosaur comedies, dinosaur battle royales, virtual dinosaurs of the future, some really decrepit pieces of dinosaur media, and an over excess of soldiers fighting raptors.
Heck, we even did see attempts at mixing the dinosaurs with a found footage film in the very decent and mostly realized The Lost Dinosaurs, and today we found him a play-date of sorts with something i never heard once about, and i had to stumble upon by combing upon lists of dinosaur films.
and i mean “stumble” because you wouldn’t guess a movie called Area 407/Tape 407 would be abotu dinosaurs, which i guess should count as a spoiler. I suppose?
Let’s be real, it’s not that much of a spoiler when you have the poster art for the film sport the recognizable “triple clawed scratchmark” that might as well spell “Velociraptors”, or a Garfield creepypasta abomination, i suppose.
I would wonder why there are 2 completely unrelated mockumentary-found footage dinosaur films in the first place… not so much about why aren’t there more of these, since Area 407 does answer that question with being a pile of dinobird dump.
As you might remember (i haven’t made a mistery about this, at all), i have a very low tolerance threshold for mockumentary-found footage films, and for that i blame most of them being fairly crap in a fashion that rubs me the wrong way, especially when they use the format to basically laze out on explanation and motivations, to pad their runtime with the narrative packing peanuts that often is a lot of random footage of people being recorded.
Even more so is when there’s no real reason for the person using the camera to even be recording in context, just because otherwise the movie wouldn’t be seen from the camera POV, or not at all.
But getting off that tangent, the plot concerns two teens taking a flight on New Years’ Eve, but due to extremely bad weather and turbulence, their plane crashed inside a remote government testing area. The survivors from the crash are then hunted in the darkness by some unknown predators, which are part of the tests being executed in the restricted facility.
Simple enough premise with something to it… and to be honest it’s not even that bad, i’ve seen plenty worse found footage films backed by huge studios, and there’s a decent build up, making you wonder what exactly is hunting the survivors.
my bias aside, it does suffer from the common issue of these having the characters become annoying as they overplay the panicked reactions that someone would realistically have in a similar situation, so from relatable they become just grating and make you wish for the monster-entity dejour to cull their numbers, and while the dialogue (allegedly) being adlibbed helps for immersion and selling the angle, maybe a script also wouldn’t have hurt.
Since these films rely more than most on atmosphere and making you give a shit about the characters’ fates, it devolving into “banter & screaming simulator” does undermine the whole thing, and yes, i know, having to look and hear these people fighting, complaining and shouting, is something you could technically say about horror movies as a whole, but with the format and overplaying the bit it all becomes more annoying than scary (and more obvious mostly to pad out the runtime to 90 minutes), even if the acting itself is okay.
There’s no “lore” or much given in the way of explainations given -or hinted at – about the place, a bit more than just “secret government facility”, which would have been fine if the movie also didn’t have a pay off, quite inusual for these found footage films, but the pay off doesn’t add much, just confirms the idea that the government is behind the creatures (which in hindsight makes some previous scenes … just not make much sense), which we know it’s dinosaurs, even if it didn’t accidentally spoiler myself on that by the act of even finding about this movie existence, given the snarling sounds (and the brief glimpses of the creatures being raptor silouhettes) it was either that or werewolves or some mutant thingie.
It’s fairly subpar, bad but not the worse thing ever, again, i’ve seen worse theatherical found footage films than this VOD indie production, so while i don’t recommend it, chastizing it further feels futile and cruel, since it also got a (admittly deserving) very negative reception even back in 2012, and it one of those found footage films that just slipped through the cracks into instant obscurity, as i never heard or seen the title or poster art once before literal days ago.
And now that i did i see why this is the case,
I assume the very low costs of productions (which are what propelled the found footage mania at the turn of the millennium and later in the 2010s) made possible a sequel, which did happen one year later, as Area 407: Part Two.
But for now, that’s enough of found footage dino tapes.
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