"Butterfly Kisses" adds its own unique (meta) spin on the found footage genre. Definitely if you just go by the call-in radio set-piece, and its special telephone guest. Clever touch. Sure it still follows the standard low-budget sub-genre cliches, but it's how the story is presented is where it sets itself apart. Heavy on mystery with its urban legend style groundwork. A wannabe film-maker stumbles across a box (labelled 'Don't watch') of a student's film project involving research into a local urban legend; Peeping Tom. So he goes about trying to investigate if the disturbing footage is real, while trying to complete their unfinished project as his own work. He gets a seperate documentary crew to follow him around to consolidate his findings and tell his story of getting this done.
While watching I was getting 'Lake Mungo' vibes, as it focused more so on mood and discomfort than all out frights and incidents. It's slow burn, constantly conversational and sort of creeps up on you in a potboiler way. There's a documentary within a documentary within a documentary framework to the story as one film-maker's obsession becomes a domino effect for everyone involved. Meaning there's no real satisfying conclusion to it all. Probably by the end it was more interesting than entertaining.
