Scooter has its flaws but still manages to pull you in and keep you entertained. Between the laughs and a few well deployed twists, this was a fun ride. 

Scooter comes to us from Artist Rights Distribution. The movie is the latest entry in found-footage horror collection which has allowed for lower budget offerings to be much more acceptable to mainstream audiences. Everyone is recording everything and the idea behind this movie is that our protagonists do this for a living.

“The Three Amigoes” are popular youtubers who do challenges on their channel. They’ve been friends all of their lives and get to make money together by just being goofy online. In Scooter, they take on a challenge that is much bigger than anything they’ve done before as they will try to ride low powered scooters from Miami to New Orleans. Over 800 miles. I’m not sure they even made it out of Florida.

As I mention above, Scooter has its flaws but it still kept me entertained so lets break down the main things that stood out in this movie.

The characters

The main actors are Stephan Pineda, Joshua Zimmerman, and Dondre Tuck who play Juan, Will, and Paul respectively. At the start of the movie they give us some background on these guys and show us some of the stunts they did for their videos. While these moments didn’t do much for me, I know that there are plenty of guys like them who do well on youtube so I won’t knock the movie because their videos were not my style of humor. I got the idea.

It also didn’t do much for me in buying into the friendship but once they set out on their journey I was able to do so. Guys mess with each other all the time and there was plenty of that during their trip.

The trip

The aspect of the movie that I was honestly most impressed with was how they captured the trip. They made good use of drone shots as well as the POV footage from their gopros and made the journey feel real.

The group began on the highway in Miami (again, they’re on low powered scooters) and it went horribly. They were cussed out, flipped off, had horns honked at them and just overall had a rough go of it. I don’t know if the people honking at them were actors or real people but it did a good job of giving us a reason why they didn’t stay on the highway.

From there the issues they run into on the back roads and deciding to camp out in a random spot off the road were set up and make the events somewhat easier to accept.

Things go bad

When things first start to go horribly wrong for “The Three Amigoes” I felt that they responded appropriately for the most part. Things get worse when the police officer shows up and we get a major twist. I was caught off guard but thought it was well executed.

It isn’t until the cop gets involved that the movie starts to get a bit ambitious and perhaps bite off more than it can chew. The scenes in the truck and in the police station are the toughest to sit through from a quality standpoint but as far as the story itself they do advance it.

Once outside the precinct things get back to being realistic as they run into further issues that are the exact type of issues they’d face in this situation. They’re in a backwoods town where everybody knows each other and they struggle to get help.

The Ending

I found the ending very interesting. As we know, horror movie endings are not easy to execute *cough* It Chapter Two *cough* but the ending of Scooter was something I personally haven’t seen in a found footage movie and I liked it.

Overall

For one it helps that the movie doesn’t take itself completely seriously. The fact that the main characters were goofy bro-comedy youtubers sets the tone for the rest of the film. While there are some painfully low budget moments, the idea of guys trying to film a trip and stumbling into a bad situation worked for me.

Scooter has one more planned screening on October 16th in Brooklyn, NY on UA Court Street. No word on a VOD release at this time.

-Bibs