If the recent Into the Storm wasn’t enough to remind you why the awfully ubiquitous faux-doco/found-footage genre is the laziest, most aesthetically cancerous filmmaking trend, by all means check out the execrable Exists, conceptually the same movie with the twisters replaced by a really aggro Sasquatch. It’s directed by Eduardo Sanchez, who, being one half of the team behind The Blair Witch Project, can be held responsible for the proliferation of found footage horror in this era; the thing is the guy hasn’t managed to convince us, with any of his subsequent films, nor this unimaginative crud, that Blair Witch wasn’t just a flukey success that came at the right time.
Exists is hopelessly bound to tired conventions, following a group of hapless, disposable campers whose merry excursion into the woods of East Texas turns to shit when they accidentally run into Bigfoot. At its worst, the film seems constructed like an extended viral video to plug GoPro’s indestructibility: hey, it’s so freaking durable it’ll even survive Bigfoot’s reign of terror long after you have perished! Coming with the territory is that one obnoxious beardy pothead whose pervy camera, affixed to his arm like an exoskeleton, speaks to the genre’s worst crime: its dedication to vicarious realism constantly undercut by characters whose actions cannot be possibly considered realistic. Furthermore, Sanchez is unable to resist throwing in some half-hearted, hilariously high-minded “who are the REAL monsters?” catch at the end. Please.
