Found Footage: The Making Of The Patterson Project

Max Tzannes’s mockumentary Found Footage: The Making of The Patterson Project has charm, but its jokes and scares fall flat.

The film has a solid foundation: a mockumentary crew follows an eager young director, Chase (Brennan Keel Cook), as he sets out to create the “greatest found footage horror film ever made” centered on Bigfoot. There’s an obvious love for the genre here, and the meta layers are playful in concept: the movie about making a movie that becomes the movie. But for a film about a passionate creative journey, it’s strangely flat and hard to connect with.

The ensemble cast does a fine job embodying the kind of chaotic energy you’d expect from a DIY film shoot. Brennan Keel Cook plays Chase with the kind of wide-eyed ambition and stubborn determination that’s easy to recognize if you’ve ever met a film school grad (and trust me, I know a few). Erika Vetter plays his girlfriend and Assistant Director, Natalie, who tries to keep things from falling apart as Chase’s vision becomes more self-obsessed and erratic. Chen Tang is especially convincing as Mitchell, one of the crew members; his reactions and understated delivery make him one of the more grounded presences in a movie full of exaggerated behavior. Dean Cameron also brings a goofy, lived-in charm as Frank, a sleazy producer type whose scenes are some of the few that brought a smile.

But charm can only take you so far. Despite being a parody, the jokes rarely land in this film. Scenes meant to poke fun at indie egos, behind-the-scenes meltdowns, or genre tropes often feel too familiar or too forced. It’s not that the material is bad; it just never becomes sharp or surprising. At a certain point, watching a mockumentary about making a terrible horror film that then turns into the horror film feels more like sitting through the actual bad movie it’s spoofing than a satire of one.

What’s missing is either the sharp wit of something like This Is Spinal Tap or the creeping dread and subtlety of a good found footage horror film. Unfortunately, Found Footage never quite decides which lane it wants to commit to. The scares are too tame to satisfy horror fans, and the comedy rarely rises above mildly amusing. The story’s predictability doesn’t help either: there’s no real tension or curiosity about where this is all going. Once the premise is clear, the movie more or less plays out as expected.

That’s not to say there’s no value here. For fans of microbudget filmmaking and mockumentaries, there’s something undeniably endearing about watching a team try to pull off a project like this. There’s passion behind the camera, and that comes through. But it’s also a reminder that even the most clever concept needs strong characters, compelling storytelling, or at the very least, a few good laughs or scares to stay engaging.

Found Footage: The Making of The Patterson Project has the bones of something inspired, and the cast does their best to sell the chaos of a doomed indie production. But the jokes fall flat, the scares never arrive, and the story loses steam before it can ever really take off. A found footage parody about a bad found footage movie that ends up being, well… a not-so-great found footage movie itself. It’s charming in spirit, but tough to recommend.

Found Footage: The Making Of The Patterson Project will be released in US theatres on June 20, 2025, and on digital platforms on June 24 (U.S.) and June 30 (U.K.).

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