HOOPTOBER X SHORT #2

Decided to sub in the much hyped new horror film NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU into my Hooptober watching so I wanted to go with an alien-based short beforehand since I believe that’s what it concerns. After looking at lists of alien movies I was originally going to watch one called CAPTURED but could not find it anywhere even though I found an article that says it was on YouTube. An alien found footage film list pointed me to this, which is on YouTube.

And I’m quite impressed on the whole. This is a period piece set in, you guessed it, 1996 where two girls leaving for the first year of college take a detour where they eventually have a close encounter. One of the friends has just received a camcorder and is of course filming everything. It looks like a real old camcorder was used and does a surprisingly good job of making it look like it’s set in the 90s (even if there’s a couple too obvious indicators like a Nirvana poster). The acting is not great but not terrible and tension is built up quite well. It has one big issue which is it does show too much of the alien. The suit actually looks decent but it clearly moves like a human in an alien suit would so I just didn’t totally buy it. But the film finds other clever ways to weave in the extraterrestrial and I must admit the big jump scare of this got me.

Certainly well above most random alien horror shorts you find on YouTube and I’m seriously interested in director Rodrigo Brandão’s other shorts and would love to see him get a feature or at least contribute to like a V/H/S film (looks like he’s already been in some Brazilian horror anthology’s). I should note the subtitles aren’t great and apparently autogenerated (at one point a character going “Oh! Oh! Oh!” is translated as “Or! Or! Or!”) but even with some bumps it’s totally fine for the purposes of following along.