THE MCPHERSON TAPE (aka U.F.O. Abduction)

The McPherson Tape Movie Review

Back in the early to mid 1990's, there was a television show called Sightings. I would record this show on VHS and usually watch it Saturday or Sunday night around two or three in the morning. The show was all about catching the unexplained on tape (think Paranormal Caught on Camera, but on actual tape) and discussing mysteries of the universe, and living out in the middle of nowhere in Ohio, and watching this half asleep at three in the morning after a long Saturday night, it often scared the dickens out of me.

I get you, Frank

One video I specifically remembered throughout the years featured a couple guys capturing a U.F.O. and aliens out in a field, being chased by them, killing one, and carrying it into their house. I remember thinking this looked eerie and somewhat real, and since then, the visions stuck with me, though I had not seen the video since those days. Flash forward to 2021, and while scrolling through Shudder, I see a movie titled The McPherson Tape, and decide to give it a shot. Almost as soon as the movie started, the part of my mind buried somewhere deep in my brain that had held onto the memories of that video resurfaced, and I immediately recognized that this is what I had seen so many years ago (though research discovered there was one thing my memory had wrong--it wasn't Sightings that showed this, but a similar show I used to watch titled Encounters that did). Though that part of my memory was flawed, when I saw the spaceship, the aliens, and the guy carrying one into the house, I realized the visions I carried were spot-on. 

It's like it was removed from my head

Here's the deal with this footage--it was shot in 1989, and the story is that all this chaos happens in 1983, at a little girl's birthday party. Tapes of this made their way around in the early 1990's (before the Internet, for all you younger readers), and it was reported to be actual footage--this was plausible, as the tape that found its was into the hands of the true believers had no credits at all--it literally started with the party, and ended with the final shot. The footage looked real, as if somebody shot it on their home camcorder. There was also nobody coming forward to take credit for shooting this. All this added up to many, many people claiming and believing this to be legitimate footage of actual aliens caught on tape.

It wasn't

The true story is this was a film shot in 1989 with practically no budget. After having a very limited release, the master tape was destroyed before distribution, and only pirated versions, with all the credits removed, were making the rounds. All things considered, one can understand why this was so believable--the term "found footage film" was a good ten years from being a part of regular vocabulary, and though a few such movies did exist prior to 1989, they were quite unusual at the time. The movie was finally publicly acknowledged to be a scripted film in 2012, and the director, Dean Alioto (who doubled as Michael in the movie), sold VHS copies of the movie in 2003--it didn't become available on DVD and digital until 2018. 

"It took THAT long?"

Now that we have the story of the movie, let's talk about the film itself. Watching this, you could easily tell why so many believed it to be real--it feels really, really real...at least at first. The opening scenes at the party truly make you feel like you are watching a family's home video. The scenes with the aliens, when they are at a distance, look authentic as well. If all you saw was this--the couple scenes with the aliens and the family prior to the sighting--you could believe what you are watching is real. The believability collapses, however, once the family goes into panic mode, the overacting kicks in, and the story goes sideways, as we see the characters following voices, going from terror to calm at the drop of a hat, and we get the one thing I can never stomach in found footage flicks--the holder of the camera not only continuing to shoot everything, even in the face of death, but also pointing the camera in the right place at the right time every time. Still, for the budget, and for not really having much of a blueprint for how to make such a movie, this one is decent, and has some genuinely creepy moments, including a very good ending. On a personal note, it was really cool seeing the pieces of the puzzle in my mind come together (I also had an image of the three girls in the alien costumes holding the heads floating around up there, but I had no idea where I had seen the picture before--as soon as I saw the aliens up close, that picture popped into my head) to form the entire picture after all these years. 

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 6

The McPherson Tape Movie Trailer