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Released by: Gaiam-Animal Planet
Released on: September 6, 2011.
Director: Various
Cast: Various
Year: 2010
Purchase From Amazon
The Series:
Kind of like The Blair Witch Project meets The Legend Of Boogey Creek, Animal Planet's Lost Tapes series is actually a pretty cool idea. The whole 'theme' of the series is that what we're watching is real life footage of various unlucky folks, be they park rangers or campers or hunters or even a family who have moved into a new home, encountering different crypto zoological anomalies while out in the wilderness or sometimes right smack dab in the middle of an otherwise normal suburb. Being away from civilization and alone out in the woods or in the middle of the ocean or out in the desert can be scary in and of itself for a lot of us who live in urban or suburban areas. Throw in a possible monster or two and combine in with mankind's inherent fear of the unknown and you can see how some of this material might be a little on the creepy side. And it is.
Creatures covered on this disc are:
Lizard Man / Vampire / Southern Sasquatch / Werewolf / Death Crawler / White River Monster / Jersey Devil / Alien / Bear Lake Monster / Dover Demon
Often times shows that depend on recreations stink. They're rarely done as convincingly as they need to be, probably because television by its very nature almost always requires a fairly quick turnaround time, and that makes it hard for an audience to suspend its disbelief. With Lost Tapes, however, Animal Planet has actually managed to create some pretty convincing material - and part of the reason that this works is probably because it's not actually recreations, but standard flat out acting that we're seeing. The series does not purport to be based on actual real life events, even if it does take inspiration from various urban legends and folk tales. Maybe this allows the performers to find their own characters and deliver more convincing performances, who knows, but regardless it's all handled quite well. Not every episode succeeds but more often than not the plights that the people find themselves in are realistic enough that, once you realize it could happen, you start to get sucked in. Case in point? The second episode on this disc, Vampires. Here we meet the aforementioned family who have moved into a new home, well, new to them at least. In reality the house is very old and very decrepit and has been abandoned for some time. It's definitely a fixer upper. When the nine year old son things he sees a monster in his room, mom and dad understandably try to convince him it's nothing more than his imagination but when the pest control guy doesn't come out of the basement and they head downstairs to look for him, they realize the little kid was right after all. This isn't an exceptionally original plot and you know where it's all headed but the first person style camera work puts you in the moment and the three principal cast members are quite good, good enough at least to hold our attention.
Shooting much of the content with handheld cameras to give it all a 'found footage' look and feel is nothing new. Paranormal Activity recently made an ass-load of cash doing it, as did the aforementioned Blair Witch Project and of course the mighty Cannibal Holocaust before that, but here it seems a wholly appropriate method of telling these stories. It fits with the theme - if these creatures do exist and have managed to stay hidden for so long, it would make sense that we're not going to see them in extreme close ups or posing for cameras, if we see them at all it's going to be in the background, glimpses here and there. The series gets that aspect of it right and it's all the better for it. On top of that, a lot of this is told from the perspective of those who might actually be running around with cameras. The Lizard Man episode follows a TV news reporter who heads into the sewers with some firemen to help retrieve an old woman's cat. It's presented as nothing more than a typical filler piece, a human interest story for a slow news day, but once they're down in the sewers of this normal looking South Carolina town, of course, they find out that the Lizard Man rumored to be in the area is more fact than fiction.
The series also plays around with the concepts of good and bad. Rather than function as just a simple 'monster' series, there are definitely times where the critter of the week will defy viewer expectations. Testimony and commentary from 'crypto zoology experts' is spliced in between the 'real life' segments of the show to provide some context for all of this and the series winds up being both interesting and good, creepy fun.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Aside from the fact that all of this material is interlaced, the 1.33.1 fullframe transfers which present these episodes in their original aspect ratios all look decent enough. A lot of this material is made to look like stuff that was shot on handheld camcorders out in the sticks so on that level maybe the aesthetic behind the series insists that this stuff only look so good. On that level though, it all works. It's sometimes shaky, sometimes out of focus, but that's how it's supposed to look.
This set has pretty standard Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo tracks that sound as good as you'd expect them too. There are times when the levels get pretty hot but this was obviously done on purpose to keep in line with the whole 'actual footage' angle that the series is taking. You won't have any problems understanding the dialogue and if sometimes the screams on the mix go into the red a bit, again, it's in keeping with the spirit of things so it's all good. No alternate audio tracks or subtitles are supplied.
There are no extras on this disc, just a static menu offering episode selection.
The Final Word:
Anyone with an interest in urban legends and crypto zoological oddities should enjoy this series. It doesn't always work as well as you might want it to but more often than not the producers manage to get us to suspend our disbelief just enough that it turns out to be a pretty fun watch. There aren't any extras on the disc but the A/V quality is on par with how the series looks when shown on TV, which should be good enough for most fans.
