One of the earliest found-footage movies, if not the earliest, Dean Alioto’s no-budget The McPherson Tape purports to document one family’s encounter with extraterrestrials on an evening in the fall of 1983. Despite the title, this clan’s surname isn’t McPherson, but Van Heese. The night that changes their life happens to coincide with their celebration of a girl’s fifth birthday, thereby accounting for the constant use of the video camera.
The Tape’s strongest suit is that the cast members interact like a real family would at a paper-plate supper — gentle ribbing, overlapping conversations and all. Other than the two brothers — our ostensible leads — we witness more normal human behavior than we do acting. But — and this is rhetorical — how exciting is watching normal human behavior?
After that interminable dinner, unusual lights through the windows prompt the brothers to wander through the woods to see what’s what. From a distance, they spot a couple of alien life forms stepping off a landed spacecraft, or, in the words of one of the Van Heese boys, “a Martian or shit or somethin’!” Rightly fearing for their lives, they hightail it back to the house … until they decide to go back outside again. Among a power failure and the siblings hauling a dead alien inside (without affording us a glimpse), the family plays Go Fish and the matriarch voices her desire to watch Johnny Carson.
And so it goes (and goes and goes and …) until the literal last shot, when something interesting finally happens, giving us our first good look at the space invaders. It’s a letdown, however, because it’s nothing you can’t see answering the door every Oct. 31. An anal probe would elicit more emotion. In 1998, for Dick Clark Productions and the late, not-so-great UPN network, Alioto remade The McPherson Tape as Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County with less believability, but more tension and action, not to mention actual characters named McPherson. —Rod Lott