The Unknown Terror (1957): This 50s outing by director Charles Marquis Warren tried to sell itself as the sort of horror and SF movie typical of the decade. In reality, the horror of shaving foam-based fungus monsters and a single surprisingly effective shambling foam zombie attack are relegated to the film’s final ten percent or thereabout. Before that, a viewer has to make their way through a full bingo card of colonialist adventure tropes. This sort of thing isn’t always pleasant to begin with (though better films of the genre are often pretty damn entertaining despite modern viewers’ looking askance at their politics), but combined with leaden pacing and a dry and humourless presentation, suffering through it to get to the foam monsters is simply not worth it.
Double Walker (2021): As much of our time as Unknown Terror was of its own, this very low budget indie horror piece directed by Colin West can be pretty magical. At least if you’re in the mood for a slow film that tends to obscure its backstory and timeline to evoke the feeling of slightly distanced confusion its ghost protagonist (pretty wonderfully played by Sylvie Mix, who was also involved in the plotting) has in the audience.
Often, the film creates a peculiar dreamlike mood through simple devices, using ambiguity and a bit of conscious obscurity to add to the effect. Sometimes, it goes a bit far in this direction, in the way debut features often do.
Skyman (2019): With this movie, Blair Witch co-director Daniel Myrick returns to the found footage well once more, this time in form of a fake documentary about Carl Merryweather (Michael Selle) who says he met an alien when he was a little boy, and has been a bit different ever since.
The film works best when the whole aliens and conspiracy angle takes a backseat in favour of somewhat light-handed but often well-observed scenes that portray the not always easy but loving relationship between Carl and his sister Gina (Nicolette Sweeney) and Carl’s only friend Marcus (Faleolo Alailima). This portrayal of loving and trying to protect a loved one with mental illness (which Carl is to the rest of the world), and how difficult difference can be to navigate for the person who is different as well as those around him is the meat of the movie. The film finds a note of compassion and understanding without lacking humour and without falling into mawkishness.
Too bad the horror movie abduction stuff is of as little interest as it is, leaving the whole affair somewhat lopsided, though never without interest.