In order to wash the taste of “V/H/S” out of my mouth, I decided the next movie should be another “found-footage” thriller… so I gave “Alien Abduction (2014)” a try.

Looks familiar… can't quite place it…

In a nutshell, it’s about how a camcorder survived a weekend in the North Carolina woods. It was slapped by the camcorder-owner’s dad, dropped on the ground a time or two, nearly ran out of battery power once, weathered electromagnetic interference whenever an alien was nearby, bounced around from hillbilly shack through the woods to a hillbilly barn, and — in the climax — was sucked into an alien ship and manhandled (alienhandled) before being jettisoned FROM ORBIT back down to the North Carolina woods. Which merely cracked its lens.

I’ll share a personal story. My first camcorder was an RCA over-the-shoulder, full-size VHS workhorse. A keno runner in a Sparks, Nev. casino accidentally spilled a couple ounces of water on it… AND IT WAS F’ED! So whatever make/model camcorder survived the alien abduction ordeal, I’ll take one of those.

"Who are you wearing? Armani? Yves St Laurent?" "Schwa."

We’re what— 15 years older than when “The Blair Witch Project” was released and we’re STILL doing “found-footage” horror movies? Granted, this one was done much better than other recent efforts… but when the opening three minutes of the movie are the last, climatic three minutes of the movie, you kind of know you don’t need to root for you favorite character to survive. Because (spoilers) no one survives. Except the camcorder.

Another annoying part of a “found-footage” tape is that there wouldn’t be any eerie, barely audible background theme. There ain’t to synthesizers in the woods, Jack. And when light pours into a cabin in the middle of the night, it wouldn’t make a “BZZZZ-GROANNNN!!!! OMG SO SCARY” sound. Light kinda doesn’t do that.

The Doc says you could do worse; I give it a C. Available on Netflix near you.