ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul Andolina from Wrestling with Film is here to review a new found footage movie, as no one I know loves this genre more than him.

Scooter is a 2019 thriller about three Youtubers, Paul, Will, and Juan who run the channel The Three Amigoes. These three young men are known for having fun with the different challenges they take on in their videos. There newest challenge is that they are going to travel the 866 miles to New Orleans on motorized scooters. The scooters, however, can be no bigger than 50cc, about 5 horsepower. On their journey they see something they were not supposed to see and this challenge will end up being their last one.

I really enjoy films shot in the found footage and/or mockumentary style. Scooter combines the mockumentary and found footage to come up with a solid but flawed entry. The antics between the three young guys is a blast to watch even if Will can be super annoying. In fact I often wonder how they even made it to their 23rd episode with him being so obnoxious. Paul has a thing for mermaids and this is played up by taking a detour to a mermaid show where Will proceeds to have sex with the mermaid performer. This makes Paul angry for a period of time and Will and Juan keep jabbering on about Paul and Will being mermaid brothers.

When things finally go south while the three stop for a much needed rest at a campground, they witness a rape that turns to murder so fair warning, if you have issues with that type of thing. It is brief but it comes as a stark contrast to the light-heartedness seen within the first part of the film. Things get progressively worse for our protagonists from there.

My biggest gripe with the film it is that cameras are seemingly left in areas or already in areas that make no sense. If you are going to make your movie appear to be found footage or a mockumentary you need to have reasons for shots and a lot of them I felt were too unnatural to be included in the film.

They have a drone that follows them throughout the film but Juan does not know how to get it out of follow-me mode, this wouldn’t be an issue if the drone hadn’t have to been in follow-me mode to begin with to get their overhead shots in the early parts of their scooter trip. I spent most of my time worrying how the drone was even being piloted to begin with because I was unaware you could get a drone to follow you. I felt like a real dummy when I found out drones can be programmed to follow you by GPS.

I had fun with this movie but it also left me scratching my head at times, wondering how the film was compiled. I would have loved for this to have no credits to play up the fact that it was found footage but I know how hard that can be to pull off these days when you need to properly credit those working on your film. 

If you are interested in road-trips gone awry then this is the one for you. It’s a very brief film at about 72 minutes so it’s not much of a time commitment. I’d say give this one a watch when it sees its release.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team, but that has no impact on our review.