Studio: AFM Productions
Director: Wayne A. Smith
Writer: Wayne A. Smith
Producer: Wayne A. Smith
Stars: Wayne A. Smith, Denise Devlin
Review Score:
Summary:
Two graduate students encounter paranormal activity while scouting a remote mountain home for a university experiment.
Review:
You probably haven’t heard of it before, which is one of the reasons why “909 Experiment” remains a peculiar footnote in the early history of the “found footage” boom. IMDb dates the movie to 2000, placing it only one year behind “The Blair Witch Project” (review here). What’s odd about this though is that Google doesn’t return any search results for “909 Experiment” dated earlier than 2010, around the same time I first heard of the film by finding it listed on Wikipedia’s “found footage” entry. This makes it difficult to verify exactly what the movie was doing during the decade between its purported production and first authenticated public consumption.
I’ve no real suspicion that “909 Experiment” isn’t from 2000, as its shot-on-tape aesthetic certainly dates it with 20th-century DIY production quality. I just can’t locate independent information regarding a premiere, screening, release, or anything else explaining where the copyright year comes from.
This could be because “909 Experiment” apparently didn’t have any of the above. According to two separate trailers posted to YouTube in December 2009 by user ‘909Experiment,’ the film played once in Santa Monica before ten copies made the rounds with potential distributors, but it was never formally released. On one of the online reviews I found, a commenter with the same name as the director claimed in 2010 that a torrent would have been the only way for someone to see the unfinished movie. I was able to confirm a torrent being posted in February 2010, although “909 Experiment” has also been freely available on YouTube since October 2011.
For what it’s worth, I was also able to verify that director Wayne Alex Smith’s band Metro, whose music bookends the movie, did release an album titled m909.com in 1999. There’s still no known way to sort the movie’s “lost years” for certain, much less plot the path to how it eventually surfaced in 2010.
Online searches for “909 Experiment” are more likely to return references to “Paranormal Activity” (review here). If anonymous comments carry any credibility, unknown parties seem to push a notion that Oren Peli’s 2007 groundbreaker took its premise from “909 Experiment,” even with the latter movie allegedly only being available in back channels prior to 2010. One of those YouTube trailers from 2009 plainly asks, “could the makers of the hit ‘Paranormal Activity’ have seen 909 Exp between 2000-2006? You decide, the similarities are incredible.” I don’t have skin in either game, but there’s just as much circumstantial evidence to propagate a conspiracy theory that “909 Experiment” didn’t exist until after “Paranormal Activity.” It doesn’t appear to have an easily traceable footprint prior to 2009 at any rate.
The similarities between the two productions save me the trouble of having to summarize “909 Experiment’s” plot in too much detail. Basically, grad students Jamie and Alex are in a romantic relationship. They are also out to make $300 by spending a weekend in a spacious Lake Arrowhead cabin while documenting any unusual activity for a university science experiment. Easy peasy. Of course, things gradually go bump in the night, ultimately escalating into an apparent possession pitting Alex and Jamie against one another.
For its weird history recapped above, as well as the position where it falls on the “found footage” timeline (assuming accuracy of the 2000 date), “909 Experiment” carries moderate value as a curiosity. Outside of that, little else exists to make the film worth a watch for all but the most studious “found footage” devotees.
While there’s no reason to question the sincerity of writer/director/producer/co-star Wayne A. Smith’s intent, inexperience earmarks the movie’s making at every turn. “909 Experiment” opens on a shabby seven-minute montage of winding mountain roads, clips of Jamie being interviewed, and non-contextual inserts of black-and-white spectral photography, all of which is set to a bizarrely awful noise rock song. An annoying buzz plagues the audio of Jamie’s talking head segments. Improvised conversations between the two actors, neither of whom have any other acting credits of note, are stiltedly creaky. When Smith’s co-star Denise Devlin recites her scripted dialogue, that creakiness turns rigidly stiff.
I say this matter of factly, not to be derogatory. In fewer words, “909 Experiment” illustrates the efforts of amateurs fumbling to find a film without having a roadmap to work with.
I can’t give Wayne A. Smith the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t make up his movie as he went along because the smidges of fiction don’t construct a discernible narrative. Near the start of the setup, Jamie and Alex mention glimpsing a creature in dark woods that seemed to have three sets of eyes. Jamie and Alex also note that all of the clocks in the house are frozen at three o’clock. There’s a cold room with a hot doorknob. For the climax, Alex explains his sleepwalking trances by mumbling about a murderous German soldier who committed suicide inside the house. So what the Hell is supposed to be going on exactly?
For all its references to paranormal activity, both within the film and without, “909 Experiment” features supernatural shenanigans no scarier than a two-liter soda bottle toppling on a countertop and a lamp swaying above a pool table. While Jamie and Alex ponder organized religion over breakfast, sudden cuts to surveillance footage of leaky faucets, a truly odd place for a close-up camera to point, predict the horror of inexplicably running water encountered later.
When scares consist largely of banging noises and a strange scent you obviously cannot smell yourself, neither of which is cinematic in the slightest, characters are all that’s left to engage an audience. Jamie and Alex are ambiguously defined at best and outright uninteresting at worst, however. I would be curious to know if Smith and Devlin were involved in real life, as they have no romantic chemistry onscreen. Although the movie mentions a near-death experience giving her unusual intuition, Jamie never meaningfully employs this lone crumb of character development. The most significant thing to note about Alex/Smith is that he looks a little bit like James Ransone.
It’s easy to believe “909 Experiment” is an unfinished film after all. Potential lurks in its hodgepodge of ideas, both story-wise and with regard to “found footage” staging. But it plays like a rough draft of a better conceived, better executed flick. To the chagrin of “909 Experiment,” the better film in this case is “Paranormal Activity.” Whether one influenced the other can be debated. There’s less of a question regarding which one horror history will remember, as “909 Experiment’s” points of interest have more to do with murky origins than with technical merit.
Review Score: 30
If you want to see impossible amounts of blood explode crimson colors like the world’s worst version of a gender reveal, well, “Abigail” at least has that.