The ‘Owner House’ has been vacant for several years because of its very dark history but with the recent series of murders, it has been taken to the next level. A family who just moved in has been murdered causing the curiosity of a group of friends to get the best of them. Deciding to break in and investigate with handheld cameras, would be the worst decision of their fun-filled night. The terrifying and suspenseful footage has been edited for the film “Unlisted Owner.”
Found footage holds a valuable territory in the horror genre. It’s a bridge between fiction and reality. As an audience member, one can separate the gross antics of “SAW” or the giant monsters of the ’50s away from reality. In advertising for “The Last House on the Left,” flyers and trailers told audiences to repeat to themselves, “It’s only a movie,” to keep them from being scared out of their seats. But for the found footage subgenre, a movie is as good as it is believable.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of “The Blair Witch Project” which launched the mysterious tape trend into popularity. Since then, films such as “Cloverfield,” “V/H/S,” and “Paranormal Activity” have kept this format alive. While these will constantly be looked at as the more prominent “true stories” that made it into our homes, it’s not because they’re the only ones out there, it’s just that the others were probably left not found. “Unlisted Owner” is a prime example of a movie that should have been left in the evidence box it was stored in or on the pages of the Introduction to Screenwriting class it was written for.
If the synopsis at the top was true, the film might be worth checking out, but instead, the audience is given an hour of six friends just angrily yelling at each other about beer and girls. This leads to the great payoff of fifteen minutes of them walking around a house angrily yelling about how they all think everyone else in the group are idiots who had too much beer. If the goal of a found footage film is to blur the lines of movie and reality to create a “real image,” “Unlisted Owner” misses it by a mile. With some of the most clichéd tropes and characters, being portrayed with some of the roughest acting out there, the only real thing about the characters is how they’ll remind you of the real people who still live in your hometown that never grew out of high school.
Found footage films are constantly being produced due to how easy it is to make them. It’s not hard to mess up the technical side of found footage as a filmmaker when it’s supposed to look like any John Doe shot it. Yet, “Unlisted Owner” even managed to screw this up by throwing a harsh “glitch” or “corruption” filter every twenty seconds throughout the film. It makes the movie truly hard to watch as opposed to the overly stylized look it was obviously hoping to achieve.
Let this be clear, in no way is this in the realm of “so bad it’s good.” With films like that, one can kick back, have some popcorn and laugh along with friends on a Friday night. “Unlisted Owner” will have audiences thinking, “Wait, I do value my time more than this?”
Now available on Video On Demand
