Remember when found-footage was the property of the horror genre, as The Blair Witch Project gave birth to countless knockoffs that rarely duplicated that film’s creepy chills? Well, the genre is expanding. Recently, Chronicle made decent use of the found-footage gimmick to tell a superhero origin story. And now we’re getting a teen-house-party comedy produced by The Hangover director Todd Phillips -- the equivalent of Can’t Hardly Wait, Superbad, or American Pie -- that uses the camera trick. It’s called Project X, and if this new red-band TV commercial is to be believed, it’s raunchy. Check it out, via IGN:
I’m a parent, so yeah, this terrifies me. One day, I’ll be that hapless, all-too-knowing father leaving the house for my idiot kids to trash. It’s a rite of passage, and so are house-party comedies like this. The novelty appears to be the use of hand-helds and the whole found-footage approach, which is wearing a little thin as it tries to mask the fact that we’re basically just seeing a movie we’ve seen multiple times before. Who’ll find the footage? The parents? The neighbor whose tree catches on fire?
Do you know what would be better? If someone found the post-blowout video cassette, popped it into a camera, and unearthed Jonathan Kaplan’s sci-fi drama Project X with Matthew Broderick, young Helen Hunt and a chimp. Hard to top. Instead, look for Project X when it opens in theaters on March 2.
