It’s not the same as the video store, but I often find myself browsing through rows and rows of random “box covers” on assorted streaming services, just looking for something to catch my eye for any reason at all. I don’t know what made me pick up and read the “box” for The John Perkins Tapes from director Sid Lucero, who co-wrote with Vic Lucero, presumably his brother. I’m not often drawn to found footage films, especially ones with a “The (insert literally anything here) Tapes” title, but I clicked in and did a quick pass over the scroll bar to get some preview stills. It at least looked like it would have some interesting splatter, and I have a detached fascination with torture porn, so I hit the play button.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was definitely not this. The backstory, as explained up front, is that what we are about to see is a collection of videos made by a serial killer called John Perkins. Perkins would torture and murder people and get it all on tape, then use that footage to make weird little expressionist film school vibe short films, psychedelic music videos, stuff people might call “experimental” or “art films”. And while The John Perkins Tapes isn’t the kind of film I personally enjoy, I still found myself appreciating a lot of what the film does to take advantage of the oldest horror trick in the book: give them just enough to fill in the rest themselves.

Let me be clear up front: this is a brutal film of repugnant events. But unlike other movies with a similar “simulated snuff film” vibe (looking at you, August Underground), the goal here is not purely visceral revulsion with convincing mutilation effects. The John Perkins Tapes gets a lot of mileage out of a whole lot of blood and implications. “What kind of psychopath films his crimes but shies away from showing the most brutal parts,” you may ask, and that’s a fair question I can’t answer in a world where I saw legitimate snuff films on the internet in the early 2000s. What I can tell you is that, much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I left this one feeling like I had seen more than I really did.

John Perkins himself also explains that simply filming his murders is not the end goal – he’s not making a documentary (though he tells people he is to explain away the constant gonzo filming), he’s making movies. We see several segments of footage he has of bands playing live, and then what appears to be a full production music video for a goregrind metal band that includes footage of the murders in its montage. It seems maybe the goal is to get away with showing his work publicly to people who might not believe what it is. Early narration even implies there is some disagreement on whether what we are seeing is real or a movie John Perkins made, in spite of being found with human remains and many of the people in the footage identified. And ultimately, who knows why a psychopath does psychopath stuff?

The depravity amps up the intensity as we go along, ultimately peaking with a brutal assault which I will not detail here, and many will very much rather not see. And there are a couple of gore effects moments which I will also not spoil here that do go big and explicit. But overall, there was a lot of instinctual eye aversion I had to fight over things I was only seeing in my own imagination.

This sort of film is often more about the concept than a detailed narrative, but The John Perkins Tapes at least made sense to me for about the first hour. Then it makes a choice going into the third act that adds an entirely new level that I feel significantly devalued the rest of the film.. It almost feels like maybe they had their movie done but decided it needed to be 80 minutes instead of 60, so they came up with an idea and tagged it on. It reminded me a lot of 10 Cloverfield Lane in that way.

If I have to give a signature nitpick, it’s that I would have dropped the idea that this was something other filmmakers cobbled together from seventy-two hours of found tapes and just made it the only video found, as the “thesis film” of John Perkins, and then title it The John Perkins Tape. Singular. There’s way too much random stuff here to justify the early narration calling this “all the relevant footage” from seventy-two hours of tape.

As mentioned before, The John Perkins Tapes is not the kind of movie I can say I enjoyed, but it did manage to impress me with how it creatively achieved a heightened sense of severity. If you do have a taste for simulated snuff or torture films, this could be your new favorite movie. Also, see a therapist.

3.5/5 Skulls

The John Perkins Tapes is available now for free with ads on Tubi, or to rent/purchase on Prime.