If found footage is your comfort horror, then this trio of derivative flicks should do the trick. The highlight for me is that all three run between 70 and 75 minutes long.
THE LAST CABIN (2025)
This one is only 70 minutes long, and it combines The Strangers with found footage, so there are some cheap, totally cliché thrills to be had here.
The opener shows a trio—man, woman, and camera person—traipsing through the woods with a flashlight at night. They make the mistake of approaching someone in a hoodie whose back is to them. Like…have they never seen a found footage film? It doesn’t end well for them, which makes me sad, since I wanted the hot daddy to be the star.
Next…another man, woman, and camera person are traipsing through the woods at night with flashlights. Sigh. They are scouting for a shooting location for a film. They find it in an awesome “cabin” that looks bigger than my house. The interior is amazing, except for all the windows and glass doors with nothing covering them. Eek!
The group convinces the guy who lives there to let them film inside. Before leaving, he warns them to beware of the backwoods folk in the woods. Uh-oh.
There are some pretty creepy moments and some jump scares as the usual home invasion routine is unleashed, with multiple masked figures with weapons surrounding the cabin. Thankfully, it first hits—hard—when the “producer” shows up. He is such an obnoxious character and gets exactly what he deserves.
There’s a discovery of dolls in the woods (because dolls are scary), the lights go out, and running and screaming ensue. Yet the main group takes a movie-viewing break in the middle of being terrorized. They find home-made DVDs that show them that something very “sinister” happened to other people at the cabin in the past, and it’s one of a few gruesome moments in the movie.
Found footage predictability just keeps coming, right down to the main girl having a confessional breakdown for the camera. The only part that stood out to me because it didn’t make much sense was when one of the masked baddies lifts the mask to reveal that they have what looks like a demon eye. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be just a backwoods inbred thing, because other than the eye, it looked like a normal person.
OUIJA CLOWN (2023)
I’ll give the two tween girls in this 75-minute movie credit for carrying the whole thing by themselves, but it’s mostly one long stretch of filler footage carrying us to the final scene.
It’s Halloween night, and the girls have the bedroom they’re hanging out in decorated for the holiday, so this one is going on the holiday horror page.
When one girl’s dad goes out for the night, he leaves her and her friend alone in their house in the middle of nowhere. Once he’s gone, they do total tween things, which is basically nothing.
They eventually decide to watch videos on how to use a spirit board. Conveniently, they have one of their own, so they use it, and then…the screen goes black.
When the video footage finally comes back, it feels like a chapter of the movie was left out, because suddenly they’re freaking out, and the camera is bouncing all over the place. In fleeting glimpses, it appears that there’s a scary clown in the room with them. It’s kind of frightening, but it just doesn’t do much of anything.
Neither do the girls. They run around the bedroom screaming for a good chunk of the movie. Eventually they decide to go out into the woods. It’s like Blair Witch Project boredom all over again as they spend eleven minutes just filming trees and the ground. They finally see the clown, run back to the house, and lock themselves in the bedroom…to use the spirit board again.
I’m not going to lie. While this movie doesn’t try to make sense (I mean, they summoned a clown with a Ouija board), the two girls deliver on some dark content in the final few minutes. This is the one moment when the whole movie finally shines as shit takes an unexpected turn.
A COLD GRAVE (2024)
Another one that runs 75 minutes long, this is perhaps the most chaotic of this trio. It’s essentially about a guy out in the woods looking for his missing sister, but the footage jumps all over the place to various, unrelated people encountering horrors in the forest, including a hot daddy (wanted him to be the lead) and his bizarre son, a group that fights in true Blair Witch boredom style over being lost in the woods, and a ghost-hunting team that whips out a Ouija board. They better beware of clown spirits…
I think each clip is supposed to be found footage the main dude is watching on his phone as he tries to piece together what became of his sister, but I’m not sure.
He spends a lot of time doing a stream of thought monologue for the camera. He also approaches way too many people from behind. He never learns his lesson, because it never goes well, yet he just keeps doing it.
And oddly, one dude he approaches is wearing almost exactly what the first dude with his back to the camera is wearing in The Last Cabin, including the exact same mask. What the hell? I had to look on IMDb. These two films are by the same director. Dude ripped off his own scene! Awesome.
The woods are supposed to be haunted, there’s a witch (that we actually see a few times, unlike The Blair Witch Project, where what you don’t see is more boring than what you could have seen), people seem to get possessed, there are various ghouls, everyone appears to be trapped in the woods in an endless loop of nighttime…this movie seriously just keeps throwing random shit into the mix with very little in the way of a plot. One thing we do get plenty of are jump scares, mostly thanks to music zingers…you know, tone-setting music in a found footage film. As chaotic as it all is, in a weird way, I kind of like the idea that this forest is so haunted that everyone who enters encounters some sort of completely unique freakiness instead of the same old threat every time.
A Full Moon money shot
