The Outwaters
Tuesday 8th August, 2017, the last known contact with four friends who travelled to the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video, singer Michelle August, brothers Robbie and Scott Zagorac, and Angela Bocuzzi, no trace of them since a frantic 911 call of unintelligible screaming other than the words “It’s already happened” until the discovery in February 2022 of a cache of memory cards from their cameras.
The footage assembled, it chronicles the last few days of the quartet, making plans, visiting family, drinking, smoking, the trip into the deep desert, enjoying the company of each other and the solitude of unspoiled nature until strange flashes in the night like ball lighting alarm them, losing track of the days and each other, drifting through the dried earth and time…
The found footage craze seeming to have abated in recent years, for a considerable time it was one of the most popular entry points into filmmaking regardless of the dearth of genuinely original ideas presented in that genre among the shifting slag heap of dross of crying teenagers lost in the woods and blaming each other, The Outwaters unfortunately falling firmly in the latter pile alongside A Night in the Woods as examples of the worst.
Starring Robbie Banfitch, Angela Basolis, Scott Schamell and Michelle May as the fictional counterparts of Robbie, Angela, Scott and Michelle, the film is written, produced, directed, shot, and edited by Banfitch who also provided special effects, sound design and five songs to the soundtrack as well as creating two supplementary shorts, Card Zero and File VL-624, projects seemingly more for his own indulgence and enjoyment than that of anyone else.
Depending solely on the eerie quality of open spaces rather than anything actually happening to form a narrative beyond people screaming, running around and waving torches in the dark, city dweller Angela perhaps representing the target audience, shocked by the weather and the presence of insects and finding the experience “weird,” at almost two hours and composed in the latter parts of jumbled images and screeching noise The Outwaters is too dry to even fill a thimble.
Robbie losing his friends, his clothes and his mind, shambling around naked and covered in red goop though his camera remains remarkably intact and functional, the lens blessedly clear, occasionally attacked by squealing and twitching tentacles, there is no reason or explanation for anything which happens in the film, it simply does, demonstrating if nothing else that access to a camera and an abundance of free time does not a good film make.
The Outwaters is streaming on the Arrow platform now
