The Poughkeepsie Tapes

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 Ploughkeepsie Tapes is an absolutely awful movie. It's not even a movie, I would call it a slaughter/torture porn film for people to watch in groups during sleepovers to scare each other. This movie is written by people with the minds of teenagers, for people with the minds of teenagers.

There's very little purpose for the movie other than to utterly horrify the viewer with gruesome details of a fake serial killer. At one point the police go into extreme detail about the intestines of a victim being ripped out and "laying on the floor like Christmas lights". There's absolutely no realism. I didn't believe for a second that it was anything but a mockumentary. The acting and writing were atrocious.

It's pretty much Blair Witch Project meets Saw. It's the mockumentary style which has been done many, many times. It's been done a lot better in Blair Witch, Cloverfield, and dare I say, Diary of the Dead.

And unlike Saw and Blair Witch, there are no characters to root for, all the viewer gets is screaming victims, who are introduced, murdered or survive and get tortured.

This film is pretty much the equivalent to a sucker punch to the balls. You know those youtube videos where nothing is happening and then someone pops up and screams very loudly? That's what this movie is. I'm not sure who enjoyed this movie? Probably the same people who think Ouija boards are scary.

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

An interview at the Tribeca Film Fest with director John Dowdle revealed - when asked if this movie is based on an actual killer in Poughkeepsie - that (and I quote): "It's actually a combination of a number of them, but there's one -- Edmund Kemper. He was a really, really scary guy and we took a lot of pieces from him and we took some from the Green River Killer. There was a guy in Chicago we took pieces from. There was a duo in Michigan who worked together and filmed everything they did, and we took some stuff from them. Some from Ted Bundy too. So we sort of combined a lot of different real stories. Remember that couple that kidnapped a 19-year old girl and kept her as a slave for six years? We took pieces of that as well." So all of you out there insisting that this is a true story about a Poughkeepsie killer who video-taped his murders are making fools of yourselves.

This horror flick is unique in the way it leaves a lot to the imagination. Most of the acting is poor, but the story of Cheryl Dempsey makes the movie worthwhile. In fact, her story, could have stood on its own. The character is portrayed well, and it is very hard to forget what happens to her and how she is affected. Because of how devastating her story is, and because a lot is left to the imagination as to how her story progressed, the movie is actually worth watching for horror buffs. If they'd left her story out, most of the movie would be a waste of time. Her story also makes the serial killer in the story much more engrossing, since it gives a kind of unusual psychological depth to his character which is often missing in horror.