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The Found Footage Festival, Volume Five

THE FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL, VOLUME FIVE. Screens Friday (February 4) at the Bloor foundfootagefestival.com. See listing. Rating: NNNN


Schadenfreude never felt as good as it does while unpacking the treasures of the Found Footage Festival. The fifth edition of Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher’s travelling compendium of clips salvaged from abandoned VHS tapes returns to the Bloor for a one-night stand. It’s not pretty, but these things never are.

Pickett and Prueher are experts at distilling an hour of dated, vaguely icky video production into two or three minutes of pure awkward shame. This year’s collection of low-resolution lowlights includes bits from self-hypnosis tapes, celebrity workout videos, seminars and retail safety videos.

Sure, you can find most of these online – YouTube’s lousy with this stuff – but there’s something kind of sweet about a curated program of retro embarrassments, particularly one that sets aside some time to salute the bizarre karaoke videos of folksy singer Frank Woehrle, whose performance of Frosty The Snowman could give small children night terrors.

My favourite segment is the opening reel of clips from bizarre cable-access show Petpourri, in which cheerfully negligent host Marc Marrone takes calls from viewers while leaving various birds, ferrets, kittens, puppies, lizards, monkeys and turtles unattended on a cramped display table.

I know it’s wrong to laugh at the sight of a bulldog puppy treating a turtle’s head like a chew toy, but you try keeping a straight face.

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