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Footage Festival promises hilarity
Founders encourage more submission of funny, unedited VHS submissions.
Published May 7, 2010
The festival that puts "America's Funniest Home Videos" to shame is making its way back to Columbia. Found Footage Festival is a collection of terribly hilarious video clips. Founders Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have contributed to "The Onion," "The Late Show with David Letterman" and "The Colbert Report" and have collected the videos for years. The two began collecting after their first find in 1991.
"It all started with a remarkably bad training video I found in the break room of a McDonald's," Prueher said.
Prueher, Pickett and their friends would watch the film over and over again, with Pickett and Prueher providing constant commentary.
"From then on, it was kind of an insatiable quest to look in out-of-the-way places like workplaces, thrift stores and garbage cans for more VHS gems," Prueher said.
And "gems" is a perfect way to describe these poorly produced and horribly acted video clips. The videos are predominately from the 1980s and 1990s and range from dating ads to cheesy commercials to celebrity public service announcements.
"We've met a lot of really cool people who've found tapes and want to donate them to the cause," Prueher said.
Along with showing the videos, Pickett and Prueher introduce and analyze the clips for the audience. No one has seen these videos as much as these two, so they tour the country to show off their prized finds. The festival appeared in Columbia last year, and Ragtag Cinema was more than willing to host it again.
"This year they came to us with a whole new show," Ragtag employee Michael Lefebvre said.
Although the preview has not dropped, the trailer of the festival on their website looks like pure comedy gold. Among the videos online are the greatest music videos of the 1980s, some fine-tuned aerobics routines and, of course, a Chuck Norris cartoon.
The exposition of these film disasters is a must watch, but Nick Prueher warned all would-be film viewers.
"There are many things in this show that you will not be able to un-see," Prueher said. "I'd like to formally apologize in advance."
The clips that cannot be un-seen are a small price to pay to be able to watch one giant, hilarious train wreck.
With the bevy of VHS delights, how could it be anything less than hilarious?
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