RATING: B

A Found Original of a Willow Rock Productions film. Written, lensed, edited, and directed by Michael Rock. Produced by Dillon Brown, Joshua Brucker, Hunter Nino, Dustin Tamplen, and Matt van Bodegraven. 

Stars Eddie Blake, Michael Rock, Amanda Morgan, and Hannah Welty. 

A couple of friends head to the woods to find a monster and make a movie out of this in this wild and crazy puppets-meet-humans horror-comedy. 

Ollie is an aspiring filmmaker, and he decides to make a film about a legendary fish-man creature that is supposedly in the woods. He decides to take his housemate Filbert, along for the ride, much to his chagrin. As the couple head into the woods, Ollie narrates things while Filbert has no interest and tries to make the most of it by making fun of it. However, when they hear a scream, they come across a campsite where many people are found dead. They find two women, Jasmine and Marley, who survived the attacks. Together, they decide to find a way to escape but soon learn a terrifying truth. 

Should I mention that Ollie and Filbert are actually puppets? That’s what makes this hilarious. Perhaps taking inspiration from both The Blair Witch Project and The Happytime Murders, Michael Rock makes a just literally over one-hour film that could pretty much explain, from the group’s point of view, why they hate the genre known as found footage. 

One thing about found footage films is that sometimes, if it is not done right, it could be a total snoozefest and by the time the reveal comes, one will question if it is worth the wait. Well, in the case of this film, there are some funny moments before things get a little serious. In one scene, Filbert takes a fake head and puts it on a stick and hides behind a tree. Ollie is not impressed and tells Filbert he needs to watch more movies, and Filbert gives a funny response to the statement. 

It is when the two hear screaming that things go from funny to serious, but still funny because, come on, we’re dealing with puppets here. Of course, Filbert, being the smart aleck he is, yells out the line “Cue the horror music!” before they find a wave of dead bodies. When they meet Amanda Morgan’s Marley and Hannah Welty’s Jasmine that things slow down a bit as they try to find a way out of the woods. The finale does offer a twist to things, and thankfully, the slow burn doesn’t last too long because the film does have a runtime of just over one hour. 

I Hate Found Footage succeeds as a funny homage to the genre, with puppets as the main characters involved, with those who don’t seem interested in the subgenre of horror, will see this as a means to perhaps mock the genre in a funny kind of way.