FOUND FOOTAGE: THE MAKING OF THE PATTERSON PROJECT

Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 19, 2025

It's disappointing to see exactly when, how, and why Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project loses its way. At first, this is the amusing story of an upstart independent movie production, trying to obtain the financial backing, the cast, a location, a crew, and everything else it requires to pull off that nearly impossible trick of actually making a movie. With all of that in place, the screenplay by director Max Tzannes and David San Miguel reveals that the procedural setup has also been setting up a series of jokes, as the actual reality of making a movie hits in ways few of these people could have anticipated.

The middle section of this movie, then, features a string of very funny gags, each one organic to both the situation, which is inherently plagued by problems, and these characters, who aren't prepared for those troubles and whose attempted solutions make things difficult in different ways. One scene here is so riotous, in fact, that it's difficult to come up with a good reason to give away either its setup or its payoff, except that it's too funny not to at least hint at what happens.

Things do slide and never recover, however, when Tzannes starts to take his own premise too seriously and embraces the idea that the movie we're watching would best be served by becoming the sort of movie the filmmakers are gently nudging with its behind-the-scenes satire. That act of self-reflection might have worked, except that it's wholly predictable and takes the entire narrative in a direction that's nowhere near as clever as the comedy before it.

The basic premise is that Chase (Brennan Keel Cook), an amateur filmmaker in California, has decided to graduate from making budget-free shorts on his VHS camera to helming a full feature. His script involves a group of friends traveling to a cabin in the woods, encountering a sasquatch, and being killed off one by one. As the actual movie's title tells us, Chase is going to accomplish this by way of the style of a found-footage horror movie, likely because it'll be cheaper and easier than any other method.

On Chase's team are his associate producer/best friend Mitchell (Chen Tang) and his assistant director/girlfriend Natalie (Erika Vetter), while Frank (Dean Cameron), who owns a used furniture store, for which the budding director made a TV ad, is the key money man. Frank has invested his last ten grand into the project, and to cover the rest of the costs, he convinces an older woman (Suzanne Ford) with dementia that her favorite actor has agreed to star in the movie. That actor, by the way, is Alan Rickman, so there are at least two obvious issues with the scheme that could be condensed into one.

There are auditions, for both the cast of protagonists and an actor who could convincingly portray a sasquatch, and talks with a casting director to try to land a name actor, although the agent has a particular way of pronouncing names that initially seems like a vocal quirk, and barely any conversations about the location itself. Chase is set on using a cabin owned by Natalie's parents, but he is so self-involved and has his head so stuck in his ambitions that Chase doesn't seem to comprehend what it means when his girlfriend has repeatedly told him that the cabin is a timeshare property.

Oh, the payoffs to these are so much fun—from learning why the casting director added a pause and a certain inflection while saying a movie star's name, to the need to find a semi-suitable substitute for a dead actor, to the notion that the bigfoot looks too convincing in terms of the costume and the performance off-camera for a particular time of year in the woods, to a subtle love triangle being established between the three lead creatives on the project. Tzannes' angle is that the movie we're watching is a kind of found-footage document, too, with a French television crew working on a series about the making of independent movies. The faux-documentary conceit allows the director to poke at some gimmicks of the genre, especially as it becomes clear that the production is about to become the sort of horror story that they're making—until it simply does become one of those movies.

As for the funniest bit, it arrives when Chase discovers that one of his actors doesn't realize he's also the de facto cinematographer for the movie, which results in a gag that keeps evolving in ways that won't be revealed. Let's just say that Chase's answer to the problem is so cumbersome that it requires another layer of staging and puts him in a couple of very uncomfortable positions.

Considering the intricacy of the setups and punch lines, it's genuinely a shame that the filmmakers ultimately choose the most obvious path for this story. More unsatisfying is that Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project sacrifices the comedy for more straightforward horror, while introducing an unrelated supernatural element that necessitates a bunch of rules and mythology in order to function within the story. The sasquatch stuff, after all, is right there to be used, which would still be obvious but at least more cohesive, and given how smart this material can be, it's a surprise the filmmakers bungle it in the last stretch.

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