Phoenix Forgotten (**1/2)

You'd be half-right in assuming that PHOENIX FORGOTTEN was a blatant ripoff of 'The Blair Witch Project.' As one might expect, the found footage genre has never really matched that film's commercial and critical success, but it's no surprise why. The thrill of The Blair Witch came from the unknown - the mystery that what we are watching could in fact be true. The logic behind it made sense, as did the realism of a shaky camcorder. Nearly 20 years later, the genre is all but dead, and potential for scares is replaced by the simple checking off of cliches.

The movie is set in modern times, 20 years after the famous Phoenix Lights in Arizona when thousands of people looked up in the night sky to see a strange formation of lights form in the night sky. They moves with skilled precision, indicating that they may belong to one singularly large, triangular object. As soon as they came, they disappeared. Three high school kids (Josh, Ashley, and Mark) decided to probe the desert in hopes of finding out what those lights really were. They were never seen again. Now in present time, Josh's sister Sophie returns home to interview her parents, neighbors, teachers... She wants closure to a missing persons' case that has stumped Phoenix officials ever since.

To be honest, I was hooked by the premise. The film may be billed as horror but there is actually skill in recreating the look of a documentary that uses skillful editing to jump back and forth through time and characters. Sophie travels with her boyfriend (a documentatian who is never seen) who films her and her parents with a cold distance. Her parents don't like it, but nor do they ever speak to him or acknowledge he's there either. Sophie digs through her lost brother's room and finds old cassette tapes, watching footage in order to try to piece together what has become a cold case.

The moment I began to get lost was when Sophie mysteriously finds a long-lost camcorder that has been buried in the high school's storage closet for years. There is a tape inside. It's the "missing" footage of what happened to those three kids 20 years ago. As they trudged through the desert, they are suddenly met with bright lights and odd metallic noises coming from the wilderness. They begin to run in fear, facing the camera with runny noses and begin to profess their apologies to friends and family. Sounds familiar, right?

What began as a somewhat clever film about a sister returning to her home town becomes a tired 20-minute section in which kids run from some unknown terror in the dark. If you've seen Blair Witch, then you know how it ends, and you've arguably seen it played out with more skill and precision. Justin Barber is a first-time director here and he definitely knows how to string together footage to make an engaging story He does not understand horror, nor the simple rules necessary to end a film on a rewarding note. This movie is a case of too little, too late. Too little time is spent on the actual "found footage" aspect that promised us scares and thrills. By the time we actually saw this smoking gun, though, I wondered if we even really care at all?