Welcome to the Jungle (2007)

A couple words of advice for the aspiring filmmakers of the world:

1) Do not jump on the "found footage" bandwagon. Having your film look like an amateur video does not give it a more authentic feel. It doesn't make it seem like a documentary. It makes your film look cheap, it makes you look lazy, and it makes the viewer feel annoyed. With the exception of Cannibal Holocaust, I can't think of a single good film that's been made this way. Just don't do it. I don't care how low your budget is.

2) Having characters that are insufferably obnoxious and irredeemably stupid only makes the viewer want the film to end sooner. As a filmmaker, your job is to make the viewer want the film to be longer. I stay at home and watch movies instead of going out to bars and clubs because I like to avoid being in the company of imbeciles.

In Welcome to the Jungle, four unbelievably abhorrent young adults decide to head into the jungles of New Guinea to find Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared in that region in 1961 and is apparently thought by some to still be alive, after a pilot tells them he spotted a 70ish-year-old white male while flying over the island. They think they can capture footage, or maybe even an interview, with Rockefeller (despite recognizing that well-funded search parties combed the jungles of New Guinea for months in the 60s and found no sign of the man) and then sell it for a million dollars. So they grab their video camera, make their way to New Guinea, and the viewer gets to see about an hour of asinine antics and bickering before they get slaughtered by cannibals. Everything's supposed to be as the camera recorded it, but in one scene in which the two females have a conversation the view switches from one to the other as each speaks and they're clearly not passing the camera back and forth, which would be idiotic but at least wouldn't be a glaring flaw. I don't understand how a writer or a filmmaker can create a movie that's based around a gimmick and not manage to stay within the structural confines that gimmick requires. It's like that movie Nick of Time, which was advertised as taking place in "real time," its ninety-minute runtime coinciding with the ninety-minute duration of the film's events (Johnny Depp's character's daughter has been kidnapped and he has ninety minutes to assassinate someone or other or Christopher Walken's character will kill her), but there's one scene that's in slow motion, Depp's character blacks out at one point and rather than have a blank screen for the minute or so that he's supposed to be unconscious the film just skips ahead to when he wakes up, and then there's the minute or two of introductory and closing bullshit that takes place before and after the main action (not to mention the closing credits). Such ineptitude is unforgivable.

I will admit that there are a couple of effective scenes in this film, but they're not worth wading through the rest of this mess for. Avoid it.