Missing 411: the Hunted

[JasonPratt]

This is a somewhat-unexpected sequel documentary to David Paulides' book series, this time focusing on cases of missing hunters rather than missing children as in the first doc. Some thoughts.

1.) I splurged on the Blu of the first film's release and was not disappointed: lighting and shot composition quality was high. This release didn't seem to feature a Blu option, so I only bought on DVD. Lighting and shot composition are up to par, but naturally don't look as sharp at 480p rather than 1080. It's possible to buy on Amazon Video for $16 in high-def, but that version seems to lack the supplemental extras.

2.) No chapter marks in the film, per se (even though the doc has "chapters"), although there are chapter skips for the subsequent supplementary material. No menus either. A totally barebones disc production, but at least the thing starts up immediately without doodling through the usual pre-film stuff on most DVDs.

3.) At first glance, this looks like a significantly longer doc at around 2hrs 30 minutes. However, a good 50 minutes of that are the supplementary extras, so it's really more like 1hr37, which is comparable.

4.) The supplementary extras involve extra pieces from the interviews (mostly on the first case) not included in the doc per se, and a bear safety discussion at a grizzly-rescue park. (Where the grizzlies are rescued, not people from the griz! ;) ) The latter fits into DP's side-focus on safety out in the woods.

5.) The cases in the actual doc are mostly new -- and for which he released a second edition of the Missing:411 Hunted casefile collection, adding 40 pages of new cases including these. So, unlike the first film, these can all be found in one of his books (now).

6.) Unlike the first doc, DP ends out with two extended segments (one of them also in Hunted 1st edition), which as he notes aren't "411" cases. One of them involves a family whom he's friends with, who saw a 'predator camoflage' thing in the trees while the wife was out hunting in the back yard; the other involves goings on at a remote hunting camp of undisclosed location during the 70s, well-known in Bigfoot lore as "the Sierra Camp", which produced a series of creepy vocalizations known as the Morehead recordings. There's hot debate over these even among Bigfoot researchers, and while this is a good introduction (to a minute or two of the 90 minute audio) I have to say I'm rather suspicious about their inclusion to salt up the production. Featuring his friends' odd UFO-related 'predator' sighting (connected to a UFO report from a practicing high school band half a mile away), doesn't lend a lot of credibility to the proceedings either. (Admittedly, the Morehead vocals are nightmare inducing, and supposedly include audio characteristics beyond what a human could produce even in the chattering-language portions. How fakeable that is in the 70s, I don't know; or whether the tapes even really go back that far. The doc seems to be showing Vietnam era low-light film footage going with the vocals, but I suspect this is dramatization.)

7.) The three main cases themselves, and a few auxiliary ones, are interesting samples of the very strange missing person cases DP likes to document. They're also the best reason to watch the doc, so I've saved reckoning them in for last.  O:-)


Overall, the inclusion of the more overtly outre material, combined with more mundane though helpful material (e.g. bear attack survival), tends to dilute the presentation and its value (in my estimation anyway). DP himself shows up more onscreen as the interviewer, which I regard as an improvement from the previous doc.