Title: Unlisted Owner
Format: Amazon Prime Language: English Released: 2013
Director: Jed Brain
Starring: Chris Ash, Levi Atkins, Chloe Benedict
A found footage film...still here? I know, I can't stand them either, however, I have seen one or two that end up being good, so I still watch them in the hope I can uncover a gem.
Is this one? Well, yes and no to be truthful. The debut film from Writer, Director and Actor, Jed Brain, he does try and approach this flooded sub-genre with fresh ideas. Most found footage films are shot in a standard movie format, not making them believable as they are meant to mirror the everyday life of the person shooting them, instead they end up covering months at a time over the course of the film.
'Unlisted Owner', doesn't do this. It follows a group of 'friends' over the course of a day, from loading a pickup to the bloody finale. For me, this really helps us get under the skin of the people in the film, to understand them to a better degree than other films in the genre.
I'm jumping ahead a little, so back to the start. The film opens to a family moving into their new home, they are quickly taken down by an unseen killer, setting up the plot of the film. From here we meet your hapless friends getting ready for a camping trip.
This is where the biggest problem for me starts. Now, being English, the word 'friend', may mean something different over here in the UK, than in the U.S.A, but I can not understand how this group call themselves friends. They are constantly at each other's throats and even say several times throughout the film how much they hate each other.
In particular, the two women were so unlikable and annoying, I was hoping they where killed off first in a justifiable gruesome way. Yet for every bad there is a good. The interaction between these different people seems believable if you consider them mates at best and not friends. Add to this the acting wasn't bad either, making the viewer believe these people could easily exist. In turn, this made the finale quite a tension filled jaunt through the murder house as one by one, they fell. In my opinion we could have done with getting to the murder house a lot faster than we did, as again (in my opinion), the set up wore out its welcome, mainly due to those annoying girls.
So, will it redefine the found footage sub-genre, no, but to his credit, Jed Brain does try something new and almost pulls it off. With a little tidying up in the editing studio this could and should have been much better. Yet, as it is, its not bad and it is the first time in a long time I've made it to the end of a found footage film, so that for me, counts for a lot.
