–although perhaps my suspicions are misplaced. I would have thought that taking recent materials such as corporate training films, safety videos, and the like, repackaging them as comedy fodder, and showing them to paying theater audiences might present extensive copyright problems. Evidently not, though; or else the corporations in question just haven’t gotten around to crushing these guys yet. Regardless, I haven’t laughed so hard in quite a long while, so more power to them.
Supposedly, The Found Footage Festival got its start by culling material from the piles of old videotapes gathering dust in secondhand stores (largely obscure specialty videos and discarded home movies). The result is nothing short of gut-busting; sort of a cross between MST3K and someone else’s embarrassing high school yearbook photos. Some highlights include:
–A McDonalds’ custodial training video which indoctrinates employees in a frankly weird quasi-religious philosophy, urging them to “see McC” (where ‘McC’ signifies the McDonalds standard of cleanliness, a state of mind achieved when the employee starts hearing voices in their head exhorting them to clean more thoroughly);
–An equally strange video from Wendy’s, featuring a hapless employee sucked Tron-like into a pocket dimension where a rhinestone-studded rap artist and singing meat patties tutor him in the proper way to cook a hamburger;
–Traci Lords’ initial efforts to break away from the porn industry by starring in a series of exercise videos, which unfortunately don’t really draw as sharp a distinction as she might have liked;
– Then-Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stint as tourism spokesman for glamorous Rio de Janeiro, in which he dispels all suspicions that he may have ever behaved improperly toward women during that period of his career;
–Six minutes of Memorial Day weekend footage documenting the intricacies of the offroad vehicle enthusiast subculture. The sofa goes into the bonfire at approximately Minute Two; the tent burns down during Minute Three; the clogged RV toilet is drained into the parking lot around Minute Five.
–The antics of John and Johnny, late '80’s-era cable shopping network personalities who ply their trade in an atmosphere of pure nitrous oxide. Sunglasses and dresses are advertised as being “easy to use.” (I watched this at the Tampa Theater, and the presenters of the Found Film Festival were able to offer a special guest for this showing. They were able to track down ‘John’ from this particular video segment; evidently he’s a Tampa local, still active in the home shopping industry, and he came out to laugh at the 20-year old video along with everyone else. A really good sport, John was.
–Corey Haim’s post-rehab video diary to his fans, in which he compares kissing to the sensation of dolphins swimming through his bloodstream.
–The all-time crabbiest RV salesman in the world. In fact, between this guy and the Memorial Day offroaders’ video, you may never look at Winnebagos in the same way again.
All this, and there’s so much more. Most of these video clips appear to be of late '80s-early '90s vintage, and if you were ever under the misapprehension that the 1980s were one bit less hideous than the 1970s, this collection will permanently cure you of that delusion.
My one gripe about this show is that, while the guys hosting it made mention of a DVD compilation, and gave one copy away to an audience member, they didn’t actually offer any for sale at the event. Oh well, no problem, I said to myself; I’ll just order a copy online later on. So I go to their website tonight, and find that the collection is sold out! Curses! And here I could have mugged that one guy who got the free copy. I need to be more proactive about these things.
