Panic Fest 2025 Review: THE LOST EPISODE, Found Footage COPS
It's always funny when a movie has a clear reference point but can't afford the rights to directly reference it.
The Lost Episode opens with on screen text informing us that what we're about to watch was originally recorded on Halloween 2004 "for use in a popular police reality show" and later on, when one of the two leads is asked what's with all the cameras he says it's for "a reality tv show." But there's no doubt that we're watching a riff on Cops from the moment we're dropped into the footage that's ostensibly been gifted to the world by a torrent release group.
Two officers, Paul Massaro (Benjamin Sutherland) and Terrence Williams (Anthony Grant), narrate to camera and sound people seated in the back of a cruiser as they spot a "suspicious vehicle" and give chase when it speeds off. The frequent zooms to the evading car through the windshield and back into the cruiser to show Massaro and Williams are classic Cops, and that's before the chase switches to the chaos of a foot chase.
Other moments, like a call to check on a man half-nakedly obstructing an intersection and another man full-nakedly protesting the celebration of Halloween, nicely combine the joke of "this is unedited Cops footage so there's no blurring of the frequent nudity" and the introduction of plot points. These plot points initially fluctuate between alluding to potential sci-fi horror or Satanic horror plots in a way that doesn't just keep viewers unsure of where things will go, but also allows the hand-waving of "probably just kids playing pranks on Halloween" to be somewhat believable.
Solar flares causing comms to be on the fritz and the vandalism of a church with Satanic slogans nicely vie for attention for a while before things cohere. And when they do, The Lost Episode embraces its medium with chaotically shot chases, extreme violence, and tense pitch-black sequences ("kill the lights" may be said a few too many times, but what follows is always effective).
The extreme violence, including a shot off jaw and an animal being exsanguinated, is rendered practically and while it isn't always the most convincing, it highlights a love for the craft of practical gore that's worth celebrating on its own. It also doesn't especially matter that you can sometimes see the seams when the horror of these moments works as well as it does.
Much of that is credit to Sutherland and Grant who play their increasing belief in something supernatural with a perfect mix of awkwardness and sincerity that reads as genuine for these two tough guy cops. They're also given the opportunity to perform more emotional scenes as backstories for them are doled out over the course of the film, and again the slight sense of discomfort being filmed ties in perfectly with the discomfort of showing any vulnerability.
The focal point of the backstory is initially that Williams is back from an absence. We're unclear on why he was absent, and the expectations of a history of brutality or other misconduct nicely give way to something less socially charged and more tragic. But The Lost Episode doesn't let these cops off the hook either.
They're regularly threatening and immediately hostile with citizens they encounter and Massaro literally cites "we're that thin blue line" at one point. A later anxiety-inducing scene show's the protagonists' boss as he aggressively accuses two teenagers of either loitering, stealing, or having drugs on them, because they must have done something wrong and couldn't possibly just be walking home.
It's a bit refreshing to see a genre movie that's explicitly about police not be explicitly political at this point when it seems most genre films feel the need to 'say something.' Instead, the movie offers an almost believably real episode of Cops that just happens to turn into a genre movie focused purely on scaring its audience.
Visit the film's official page at the official festival site.
