The McPherson Tape

A Grey In The Life

The McPherson Tape
aka UFO Abduction
USA 1989 Directed by Dean Alioto
AGFA/101 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers here.

I’m not sure how I feel about The McPherson Tape, which started off life as UFO Abduction... I’m still trying to figure out whether I actually liked it or not. Maybe by the end of writing this review I’ll have figured that out (although I’m not holding my breath on that count).

Very simply, it’s a found footage movie, allegedly the first ever (if you knock Cannibal Holocaust out of the running for, apparently, not really sticking with the found footage idea). So, yeah, this technically predates The Last Broadcast mockumentary by nine years and The Blair Witch Project by ten so, until some other movie comes to light, this is the first one and I guess it should be respected for that. Although, alas, it never really got a proper release at the time. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Okay, so the film is found footage and, depending on your definition of horror, it possibly falls into that category too. It’s all shot in one take (although some deliberate jump cuts to slight time shifts were edited in later, by the looks of it) and concerns various members of the Van Heese family (or Van Hesse because, the end credits are really inconsistent with how the last names of all the characters are spelled) and it all takes place in a few hours one night as the family have a small, intimate 5th birthday party for the youngest daughter. The mothers of various couples are also present so we have three generations represented in this small gathering.

And then the power goes off (goodbye to anything but candle and torch light for the rest of the movie’s short running time... of just over an hour). When three of the guys, including a cameraman, go to investigate outside, they see a red flash in the sky and follow it over to a spaceship where they see three aliens (the grey, Zeta Reticulan kind most abductees describe). They are observed and so the guys make a run for it and return home but, they were followed and the rest of the evening becomes a waiting game of, mostly hysteria, as the family get divided and ‘taken’ by the three greys.

It’s kind of uneven. It starts off with a bit of text about Project Blue Book and then relies on a skeleton of a structure which the main actors can improvise around. And, the actors were very good and all very natural although, I have to say, some of the improvised dialogue didn’t really make it for me. However, the one advantage of this technique is that everything seems very real because of that improvisations and so, although I decided I didn’t really like most of the family, it does start to get unsettling as the film wears on. At which point I should probably qualify what I mean by that because the film really didn’t work in one specific way for me...

That way being... I didn’t find it scary but I really should have. Long term readers of this blog may remember I spent a good few years researching UFO encounters and alien abductions in my spare time, sifting through enough written ‘evidence’ and logical deduction to the point where I had to stop looking at the stuff... too many sleepless nights. Consequently, films dealing with this subject matter, especially when they feature the common ‘greys’, really tend to push my buttons hard and terrify me. Which is where this film let me down quite a bit. It just wasn’t in any way scary to me. That being said, because the acting is very naturalistic, I did find it a little disturbing... mostly because the family dynamic, where everyone is just acting hysterically and shouting at each other rather than rationally deciding on the most logical course, was winding me up quite a bit as various people had the worst ideas possible for trying to get through the situation. So, yeah, there’s that.

Now, the film cost something like $6,500 to bankroll... real microbudget stuff but, as I looked at the movie, I couldn’t even figure out where that money went, to be honest. But the air of realism in the actors improvising, well, almost against each other, is where the tension and interest in the film begins and ends for me. I guess, I did get something out of it... I just didn’t get any kind of terrifying experience out of this one.

Now, the film is fairly blurry and there’s a reason behind that. The film has been restored by the director from missing elements and brought to light by the team from The Bleeding Skull books and AGFA (American Genre Film Archives) and the Q&A session included as an extra on the Blu Ray is really kind of interesting and worth the price of the movie, in the end, to my mind.

Okay, so Dean Alioto made the film, UFO Abduction but couldn’t get it distributed. Then finally he got someone interested in putting it out but, before the film got a release, a warehouse fire destroyed the original master tape. So it never got a release (for almost thirty years). However, though the director didn’t realise this for around ten years after the fact, bootleg tapes of it started showing up on documentaries and so on about UFOs. A version without the front and end credits was being used and various ‘experts’ from the military and what have you were pretty convinced by the movie, thinking it was genuinely real ‘found footage’ of an abduction incident. And things started to snowball from there, with the director being accused of deliberately trying to hoax people at one point. Things continued from there and here we are today, able to see this thing on the best format possible. A format which really wasn’t designed to convey fuzzy, VHS quality playback but, hey, I’m still just grateful to have stuff like this rescued from slipping between the cracks.

The title, The McPherson Tape, is what it’s come to be known as from those UFO days... there are no McPhersons in this, although the director did do a bigger budget remake in 1998 entitled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County which, is also sometimes known as The McPherson Tape to some and is often (including on the IMDB, if I’m not mistaken) confused with the original version of the film. But then again, UFO Abduction is also probably not the best title for the film since, you know, no UFOs are actually abducted either (Ha! I’m totes hilar!).

And that’s me kinda done on The McPherson Tape. I found it interesting rather than totally entertaining, it has to be said. The improv actors are all good and, if I was revisiting the genre of ‘found footage’ for anything then I would probably take another look at it. It’s certainly not nearly as interesting as a lot of the found footage phenomenon post-Blair Witch though... although it certainly sticks to its guns on what it is more than a couple I’ve seen in the last 6 months, which seemed to forget they were found footage at all in the occasional shot (thus invalidating their entire movie).

As for AGFA? Well, they’re a partner label to the US label Vinegar Syndrome and I’m sure they’re doing well in the US. I never took a punt on them before because of the crippling cost of postage for a film I might not like but, very recently, 101 FIlms in the UK have picked up some of their titles for release over here and this is one of the first four they released. I can’t see them doing that well in terms of sales on a small island like this but, fingers crossed for them because it means I can afford to pick up one or two of their releases on occasion, at far less expense. So I’m very much hoping that the relationship between the two distributors lasts for a while.