Five friends film their quest to find the most extreme haunted house experience.
It’s pretty obvious now that plenty of film-makers with sweet FA budgets are scrambling for those last few remaining gimmicks that an audience has yet to experience in the found footage genre. Ironically this has left us with several devil movies, more than a few Bigfoots, oodles of alien abductions and more ghost movies than one could dare to count. The well is drying up fast and the time to step things up is long gone. Still, this year on DVD we have encountered Hooked Up (2013), which was filmed entirely on an iPhone. Roll your eyes if you wish – it sucked ass. Then Unfriended (2014) made things interesting…ish by setting everything on the computer screen of the film’s lead role. Innovative, but in the end it just felt like being at a buddy’s house as you watch them surf the net: tedious as hell at the best of times.
So why doesn’t the idea of the extreme haunted house experience do it for me? Well, the end result is really no different than the climax of oh, I don’t know… EVERY OTHER FOUND FOOTAGE FILM EVER FUCKING MADE… Whether it be the woods, a spaceship, a house or the corridors of an insane asylum; the poor bastard holding the camera walks, runs, skips – who cares – through any of the aforementioned locations with a sense of fear and dread as they anticipate the Bigfoot/alien/ghost that is waiting to jump out at them. Essentially it’s just the same shit with a different label.
What’s to be said about the filming and acting that you don’t already know from watching any other found footage movie? Once again, the same old bullshit: child-like melodramatics and more often than not we are looking at the back of someone’s head. The clown and doll girl certainly make for an effective pair of creepy customers, possibly the only remotely scary thing about the movie.
LAST WORDS:
There are too many camera operators here. Aside from the sole female lead, by the time you’ve worked out which guy is which, you may no longer give a shit, especially during the last hurdle when everything is plunged into darkness. Don’t worry, it’s not your attention span. There may be four guys on this doomed road trip, but only one of them has a quality that slightly resembles a personality. Poor Mikey…