When most movie fans hear the phrase "found footage," they normally cringe in fear. It’s a gimmick now down to death in Hollywood, creating an unconvincing sense of mock "realism" by using bad unrecognizable actors and cheap shaky handheld camerawork. The good ones are hard to find; the bad ones are far too easy to find.

That’s not what the Found Footage Festival, returning to Milwaukee Friday night at the Turner Hall Ballroom, is about at all. Their collection of actual found VHS tapes is bad alright, but the best, most hilarious kind of bad.

"One is a video we just found recently in Minneapolis that comes from 1997, and it’s called ‘How to Have Cyber Sex On the Internet,’" said Nick Prueher, one of the show’s two lead curators. "Right off the bat, the title is a bit redundant. It’s basically a sexy woman teaching you how to log on and find a chat room. She’s fully clothed and she’s typing, and they cut back to her and she’s topless all of a sudden. It’s like, ‘ … Wait a minute.’ It falls into this category where it’s too sexy to be informational, and it’s also too informational to be sexy. It’s like why does this video exist?"

Then again, you could probably ask that question about almost every video in the festival’s impressive stockpile.

Though the first Found Footage Festival is traced back to 2004, Prueher and his friend/fellow curator Joe Pickett started their obsession back in 1991 in their hometown of Stoughton. Prueher, a freshman in high school at the time, was working at a local McDonald's when he found the terrible treasure that would spark his passion for foul films: a training video called "Inside and Outside Custodial Duties."

"I popped it in and couldn’t believe how ridiculous it was," Prueher recalled. "It tried to have a cute plot to it where it was the janitor’s first day on the job and cannot wait to clean the toilets. I had seen bad training videos before, but this was just remarkably bad."

Prueher decided that the awful video needed to be shared with others, so he snatched it up and alongside Pickett, started hosting screenings for their friends. It became an obsession for the two boys, who went on a quest to find more and more outrageously terrible VHS tapes to share with the world.

Since then, the two have spent most of their time scouring through break rooms, garage sales and wherever else bad movies hide for the most tantalizing trash-on-tape. They also accept donations.

"We still find most of the videos ourselves, but I’d say about once a week, I get a box in the mail from somebody who’s found videos," Prueher said. "We love that. It’s like Christmas morning every time one of those boxes arrive."

The theme for this weekend’s show hits close to home for both the show’s creators and the audience: The Best of the Midwest. The show consists of a special set list of tapes and clips exclusively found in Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan.

"We’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of out live show, and we thought it’d be fun to look back at where it all started," Prueher said. "We want to celebrate the glory that is the Midwest. Partly out of nostalgia, but also because there’s something unique about it. There’s this lack of self-awareness in a lot of these videos. There was no Hollywood production value or New York cynicism creeping into it. People were earnestly trying to make good movies."

The footage on tap for Friday night and the rest of their Midwest visits – including a stop up in their hometown of Stoughton – is a mix of crap classics both old and new. The original McDonald's training video is on the marquee, as well as a montage of awful sing-a-long tapes starring Frank Woehrle. They found their first Woehrle VHS – featuring the star on the tape’s cover with a mustache and a cowboy hat – at Schroeder Used Books in West Allis before buying the rest of the 20-part sing-a-long series. At about $160, it currently stands as the most Prueher and Pickett have spent on a collection of tapes. 

They also plan on showing a montage of three completely different videos – a Mrs. Minnesota Pageant from 2000, a catfishing instructional video starring a man dressed as a pimp and "The AMS Ambicor Prosthesis," a video about "a surgical implant that basically works like a Reebok Pump" but for a man’s, um, business area. The clip was locked away after one of their earliest shows due to audience disgust and demand.

"I’m not sure how it’s going to play," Prueher said. "People might also say to never show it again. But I had to try to bring it out of retirement one last time."

The curators also attempt to track down the stars of their tapes and interview them for the show. For instance, they’ve met Woehrle and two years ago even had him perform an original sing-along song. For Friday night’s show, they have an interview they recorded with the creator of a tape called "Rent-A-Friend."

"The idea was if you were a lonely person, you could put this tape in, and the man on screen – Sam – would be your virtual friend for the hour," Prueher said. "He’ll start asking you questions and then leave a pause so you can answer to your TV screen, which it’s actually sad to imagine somebody actually being lonely enough to do that. And then it gets even weirder, and he starts talking about himself and how his mother would pit him against his brother growing up and a lot more than you want to know about this guy."

DVDs eventually replaced tapes over time. Even the festival, usually a VHS exclusive event, started dabbling in DVD finds last year, including a training video for Elvis impersonators. The show’s curators, however, still prefer the nostalgia and bizarre creativity of a tape.

"People forget now, but that was really a revolutionary format," Prueher said. "For the first time, you could have a movie or a video in your house, and you could control it. The format was so new, there was like this wide-eyed innocence to it, and people were just throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what stuck. That’s why it’s so glorious to look at all of the stuff that was deemed worthy of putting on tape in that era."

Even more than the DVD, the Internet and YouTube took over VHS’s spot on the mantel as the home of people’s most ridiculous behavior and ideas. You can now see awful instructional videos and embarrassing captured moments any time you want. For Prueher, Pickett and their cult of found footage fans, however, the festival offers something that even the wonders of the Internet can’t provide.

"I think people are so accustomed now to getting a funny video in their inbox or Facebook page, and they watch it on their little two-inch window on their laptop, and they laugh at it, and it’s done. But something magical happens when you take videos in that vein and project them up on a big screen in a room of 300 people who are there to laugh. I think people forget about the communal experience of being in a room full of people, which is how we started the show: in a living room for friends. It’s fun to recreate that in a theater."