In short: Skinwalker Ranch (2018)

Most people interested in Fortean phenomena in one way or the other will have heard of the “Skinwalker Ranch”, a property in Utah located in what appears to be located in a hotbed of all manner of strange activity from Navajo-style skin-walkers to poltergeists over UFOs through cattle mutilation – if it’s High Strangeness, people seem to experience it there. If you’ve never heard of the place, have a Wikipedia page.

The place is also known for various attempts to gather data about the occurring phenomena in a scientific manner. Of course, if you believe the people involved – some of which you’ll encounter in Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell’s documentary – the phenomena seemed to purposefully (and rather conveniently, one can’t help but feel) avoid camera lenses and all attempts to measure and understand them, as is such phenomena’s wont.

The documentary itself is a thing of two halves. Large parts of it consist of often very interesting and atmospheric material from a never finished documentary by George Knapp about the place and the surrounding phenomena. These parts are actually wonderful filmmaking, including some rather suggestive material, and while they don’t exactly convince me of the theories of the parties involved, they do certainly convince me that a lot of people have indeed experienced very strange things in the area.

Unfortunately, Knapp’s material, that seems more in the spirit of the better Fortean documentaries of the 70s, is intercut with amateurishly shot footage of the Utah desert in “suggestive” camera angles with Corbell rambling on and on about nothing through a cheap microphone, a couple of interviews that go nowhere at great length, some conspiracy bullshit, and a sit-in on the ranch with its new owner who wants to hide his identity while pontificating about having “a large empire of business interests”, and showing off his watch. Well, and a random cameo by crap pop star Robbie Williams, who, we learn, believes. If you’d cut these scenes out, the whole affair would be 90 minutes of modern folkloric bliss, as it stands, you gotta work for the good stuff here.