Review of Phoenix Forgotten (2017) by Joseph D — 21 Apr 2017

The '90s had many things, two of them were The Blair Witch Project, a decent found footage movie, & the Phoenix lights, a real UFO incident that had everyone scratching their heads for a long time. Now, they've been brought together, in...

PHOENIX FORGOTTEN!

...yay.

Seriously though, as found footage films go, it's not too bad, the premies is set up quick & clean, we follow the main characters as they search for the truth, it felt very X-Files, really, I half expected Scully & Mulder to show up to help!

The characters were all convincing, the woman who lost her big bro' when she was little, the families of those missing, who've never fully recovered, the missing themselves, none of them felt like actors, they could've been my neighbors.

The camera work of both the modern & mid-90s footage was impressive, the older stuff was a fun nostalgia trip, & the female lead's determination to sniff out the truth was quite compelling, I was really rooting for her.

The film is an hour & a half, but it felt longer, not because it was boring, it wasn't, but because it really felt like an investigation, two people searching for a tiny spark in a case gone cold many years ago. And then there's the climax, our three secondary characters: what happened to them? Are they alive or dead? Did they find anything? Did something find them? Was there some kind've coverup?

The effects were an homage to low budget student films, they made you feel like the three secondary characters were really going through an ordeal, & nothing felt fake; those kids were in that place, & stuff was happening to them.

This film took a real incident, similar to one that my family actually witnessed, & built a compelling mystery with a suspenseful ending (without resorting to lame jump-scares, yay!) that'll leave you with half the answers & double the questions. For someone who cut his sci-fi teeth on shows like X-Files & Beyond Belief, Phoenix Forgotten gets a solid 3 stars out've 5.