Poughkeepsie Tapes

Okay so this homemade small market film was written/directed and produced on a shoestring budget, and thus the results were not expected to be of epic proportions as the much bigger budget(s) of either The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and/or Hannibal (2001). Knowing in advance that the Poughkeepsie Tapes was produced and directed by independent film makers I wasn't expecting an Academy Award winning performance in the acting and/or the cinematography, but what I did get was an impressive enough THRILLER genre film which kept my interest sustained throughout.

No doubt there are many areas of improvement that can be recommended for The Poughkeepsie Tapes, but not for the miniscule budget and short timeline (30 days?) that the film makers most likely had to work within. I am taking into consideration what others may have been able to accomplish with the same restrictions that this team had and I must say that I am impressed with their end result.

I make no false claims as it is a grade B level film at best, but having said that I have watched a heck of a lot of films with 100-1,000 times larger budgets and timelines and with major Hollywood stars promoting their less than stellar films that were a lot worse than the Poughkeepsie Tapes.

I have zero affiliation with the film makers so please do not assume I am providing a generous complimentary review as I am no more than an enthusiastic film lover of the Thriller/Serial Killer genre and if you are too than please appreciate this Grade B film for what is their end result on a shoestring budget and a 30 day timeline (I found this tidbit out by watching the writer/director extras included on the Blu Ray release)

A decent 6 out of 10 rating

Based on the trailer for THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES I thought I was going to hate this movie – not because it looked disturbing but because it looked really lame. Truth is – it is a little lame, BUT the movie has a lot more creative juice than I was expecting and ultimately I found myself enjoying it. Similar to J.T. Petty's S&MAN or Remy Belvaux & Andre Bonzel's MAN BITES DOG, THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES is a pseudo documentary about a serial killer. While S&MAN and MAN BITES DOG are superior films, THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES excels due to its strict adherence to/understanding of the documentary format. Personally I didn't find the film as disturbing or horrific as I assume it was trying to be, however it did contain enough well thought out moments to convince me that the writer and director had done their horror homework (in particular a very William Castle "esque" sound bite/moment toward the film's finale). 2 little notes: the first 15 minutes are kind of slow so give the movie time AND I don't see this as a "theater" movie (I saw a DVD screener). THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES feels like a small screen movie. Have a few beers and toss it on during a late Saturday night or early Sunday morning.

I watched this movie the other night and I was pleasantly surprised. The acting is was really good from the serial killer it was a very creepy performance. The acting from the rest of the crew was not that good but this movie is definitely worth a watch.

This movie is a found footage mockumentary. So the movie takes off with a bunch of interviews of police and FBI who found hundreds of tapes containing murders and torture.

This movie was actually better then I thought it would be. It was actually really creepy. The bad quality of the camera kind of annoyed me but it was good overall

The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a faux documentary featuring found footage of a serial killer's handiwork. Through interviews with FBI profilers, the police, and the families and friends of the victims, and with excerpts from the murderer's videotapes (horribly distorted imagery: next time, Mr. Killer, buy a better camera!), we learn how the murderer has successfully evaded capture.

I've seen an awful lot of found-footage horror/pseudo-snuff in my time, some of which has achieved a level of realism that has bordered on the limits of what I will watch. But despite it's controversial reputation, I didn't find The Poughkeepsie Tapes in the least bit shocking, largely because at no point was I convinced that what I was watching was real.

Some of the acting was very weak, which certainly didn't help (those girl scouts selling cookies were dreadful), but the main problems I had were with the killer, who wasn't in the least bit intimidating (his voice and ridiculous costumery were laughable), and the fact that no genuine documentary would ever show uncensored footage of dismembered victims, as this did.

I wanted to believe and become fully immersed in the movie, but in the end I couldn't, and that seriously spoiled the experience.

For some reason I was fully expecting this to be brutal and particularly violent and traumatic and as such just instinctively avoided it for a while. But boredom got the better of me and I went and watched it. Thankfully it is not as overly gorey or gruesome as I expected, instead relying a lot on extreme discomfort and the implications of torture without actually seeing much of the actual torture.

The story is one of cops in Poughkeepsie New York finding a huge stash of VCR tapes during a raid on a serial killer's house, and there's literally thousands of tapes chronicling the killer kidnapping and killing people. It all unfolds in a documentary style which serves very well as a framing device.

But right away the film starts to quake a bit. Some of the actors portraying FBI agents or specialists look badly out of place or way too young, some of the actors add in unrealistic comments that are supposedly meant to show just how extreme this killer is/was.

The uneven quality of the acting starts to cause some of these scenes to be literally laughable, as an FBI specialist, in his most overly dramatic "barely holding it together voice" tells us that his wife accidentally watched 30 minutes of a tape and wouldn't let him touch her for over a year. Even remembering it now just made me laugh out loud not because of how it sounds, but just the absurdly serious way it was delivered.

Other events that are supposed to be serious, including even clips from the tapes themselves, filmed by the killer, sometimes struggle to maintain a balance between the theatrical/macabre and the absurd, in particular whenever the killer is shown dressed in his Plague Doctor costume. No matter how brutal or disturbing the content on screen is, the ridiculous theatricality just makes me laugh.

Some of the content matter actually fares better as a result of this unintentional comedy; without the absurd image of the killer walking on all fours with a mask on the back of his head, it would be much more difficult to take in the more brutal and sadistic things he does.

But at the same time, some of these "unintentional comedy" moments aren't a naturally flowing element to leaven a horrible moment. A lot of the police and witness interviews just try too hard to come across as "Serious true crime Netflix presents AmazonPrime documentary" and it comes across as almost wacky as a result.

The way the killer is repeatedly described as being an almost Mary Sue-ish caliber of serial killer, able to always outsmart the cops at every turn, always have everything pre-planned to perfection, described in such a way like if the killer was a Sith Lord, he would be "more powerful than Darth Vader and the Emperor and Darth Maul put together on steroids baaaa"

Some of the unexpected best parts of the film are when it touches upon Cheryl Dempsey, the longest-running victim of the killer, that it could almost become the story of her alone, her experiences and how it permanently damaged her as a person. But most of the film is spent fixating on the serial killer like he was a living Terminator, an absolute unstoppable genius that would make Hannibal Lecter look like a buffoon.

In fact it spends so much time hyping up the killer that I ended up spending more time laughing at the film than being disturbed or grossed out by it.