Accidentally Hilarious - Found Footage

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

Moviegoers can get their film of campy exploitation-film trailers at this Thursday’s “Grindfest 2” shows, held at the Fargo Theatre at 7:00 and 9:15 pm April 21st. Fans of that may also enjoy the highlights of campy video productions that make up the touring Found Footage Festival, coming up Easter Monday, April 25th. The Found Footage Festival’s local appearance will be showing just down the street from the Fargo Theatre at the Aquarium, 226 Broadway (the upstairs of Dempsey’s Public House), beginning at 8:00 pm with a 25th anniversary screening of Jeff Krulik and John Heyn’s legendary guerilla rock music documentary, “Heavy Metal Parking Lot.” Tickets are $8 for the event.

“Heavy Metal Parking Lot” is a 16-minute collection of frank and ad-libbed interviews the directors made of teenage heavy metal fans in the parking lot of a 1986 Judas Priest concert. Over the past quarter-century it gained a cult following through bootleg copies. Many have acclaimed it as one of the greatest rock documentaries ever made, including major music critics, film critics, and musicians. This led to it eventually getting a DVD release and on-line availability, but like the material in the Found Footage Festival, “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” is best appreciated with an audience.

The Found Footage Festival was created by and is hosted by Wisconsin natives Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, who started collecting unwanted old videotapes 20 years ago. They soon amassed a large archive of rare programs that have provided them a treasure-trove of comedy material, most of which had originally been intended as serious information, money-making opportunities, or entertainment. These include instructional and job training videos, public access TV shows, inspirational lecture seminars, exercise videos, music sing-along videos, dirty jokes, various “what were they thinking?” concepts like the video “rent-a-friend, bizarre home movies, and much, much more.

Material in the festival ranges from amusing to disturbing to just plain weird and sometimes even a bit sad. Prueher and Pickett introduce the selections they’ve chosen for the festival, and periodically comment on what’s happening on screen. Sometimes they show simply a series of VHS box covers and hand-scrawled cassette labels that are by themselves worthy of comment. Sometimes a tape they find in a garage sale, thrift store, or dumpster has inspired them to track down the producers and find more in the series, and in one case commission their own music video.

Programs they have found might seem merely boring by themselves, but Prueher and Pickett edit together highlights from similar types of videos, which not only become quite funny but take on a strange fascination, aided by their introductory setups and occasional comments. Some of those in the current festival include a wacky pet-show host whose on-screen animals are clearly out of control most of the time, a variety of how-to tapes on ventriloquism, hysterically inept hypnosis tapes marketed as self-help aids, a 1989 program hosted by movie star Linda Blair on “How to Get Revenge,” a montage of animal and bird calls for hunters, and safety training tapes. There’s even a segment of “guy stuff” like talk about impotence, info for police officers on motorcycle gang terminology, how to use certain weapons, dirty jokes, and more.

Most of the clips are from programs created in the 1980s and 90s, providing a certain nostalgia element to the reality-TV style fun, but a fair number were actually made over he past decade, showing that people can always become unintentionally entertaining through over-enthusiasm, excessive seriousness, outright pretentiousness, or just plain stupidity.

Monday’s single-night presentation in Fargo is part of a 75-city tour across the United States, Canada, and the U.K., their fifth different collection of clips to go on national tour, many performances selling out. Their work is now available on DVD, can also be seen in a popular web series on The Onion’s A.V. Club, on Late Night with Dave Letterman, in the hit documentary “Winnebago Man,” and has been featured in numerous national publications and entertainment news programs.

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