Note: This review is from the 2019 Fringe

Since 2004, friends Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher have curated the Found Footage Festival. The pair scour thrift stores across the United States to find obscure and ridiculous scenes and situations captured on old and forgotten video tapes. With the rise of amateur video uploaders due to the ease of use of YouTube, their job becomes harder and harder to deliver on new unseen videos. However, thankfully, the pair have put together a fantastic array of videos that will continue to horrify and astonish audiences in their newest rendition of the festival.

Pickett and Prueher control the show by having a DVD-like home menu that shows the various topics that will be covered throughout the evening. During the next hour they go through each topic, which include wonderfully strange home movies, cringeworthy karaoke backing videos, awkward adolescent pageant videos, and unedited videos from the bizarrely unmonitored world of public access television.

Before showing the videos from each topic, the two perfectly set the tone by providing foreshadowing for the madness to come. During the videos, they provide hilarious commentary that adds to the ridiculousness on screen. The duo do well to not overshadow the videos, but instead enhance the experience. Although they have found great treasures by searching through the neglected, the true highlight of the night comes when they introduce the videos created by invading the world of early morning news in America. This serves as a perfect conclusion to the show, and allows for callbacks from previous topics covered throughout the night.

The hard work done by Pickett and Prueher to make you laugh far predates the show. They have watched hours and hours of nonsense in order to showcase this collection of imperfection. Therefore, do not expect to see a large performance by the pair themselves. The show does not pretend to be anything more than an hour of mindless entertainment and should be enjoyed for what it entails.