A bachelor on an 80s dating show leans coolly in a denim jacket and v-neck shirt, his mullet reflecting the bright stage lights.
“I’m looking for the goddess,” he says, a rose held daintily at his side. “Are you the goddess?”
The Found Footage Festival is coming to the Southwest Film Center in the SUB on Sunday, showcasing clips from this 1987 dating show and some 50 other bizarre videos.
The Festival’s creators — Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett — have written for the “Onion News Network,” “The David Letterman Show” and “The Colbert Report.”
Prueher said the duo sat through hundreds of hours of footage in search of comedic gems for this collection.
“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody to watch what we had to watch to put this show together, but we’re willing to suffer for other people’s entertainment,” he said.
Prueher said the festival was born in 1991 when he found a training video for McDonald’s custodians.
“It was pretty blatant corporate indoctrination but dressed up as fun,” he said. “They had a plot to it and they had an overly perky crew trainer and a really stupid trainee. We sort of thought there was some sexual tension between the two of them, too.”
Prueher said he and Pickett began regularly showing the film and building their collection.
“It became this cult thing. There was nothing going on in our hometown on a Friday, so we’d have people over to my parents’ house, and we’d watch this stupid training video and make fun of it,” he said. “That was sort of the genesis — the thing that made us think that if there are videos this ridiculous right there in break rooms collecting dust, then there’s got to be more stuff out there waiting to be discovered,” he said.
The footage comes primarily from VHS tapes and a few DVDs, and includes anything from Saturday morning cartoons to interactive VCR games, Prueher said.
“This is the footage that would otherwise be ignored and discarded, footage that people don’t usually deem worth hanging on to,” he said. “It’s a nice little snapshot of what we were like, and not just the cleaned up Oscar-winning films from 1985. These are the relics that people don’t want you to see but say more than those really polished pieces of art.”
Prueher and Pickett now have a knack for finding strange videos, Prueher said.
Or, at least they know how to find comedic value in otherwise mundane footage, rifling through tape after tape to guide audiences through a treasure trove of film.
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“I think that Joe and I are uniquely suited to doing this because we have an incredibly high tolerance for stupid things,” he said. “You need a tour guide, because otherwise there’s no one there to separate the weed from the shafts. We’re happy to serve as the tour guides through our ridiculous videos.”
Finally, Prueher said audience members can donate strange films to the show, and he’d be happy to allow Albuquerque to get in on the action.
“We’ve never been to Albuquerque before, so if anyone’s found a video there or they have a local public access station that has a great show, we usually love people to bring those things to the show,” he said.
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Found Footage Festival
Southwest Film Center in the SUB
Sunday 7 p.m.
$5 for adults, $3 for students *
