I love found footage movies - too bad this isn’t a good one

I really really wanted to like this movie, but there were just too many problems.

For starters, if you’re going to embrace the found footage genre, then your movie has to actually LOOK like found footage. In found footage there can’t be sound continuity across cuts. That happens all the time here - the camera cuts to a different shot but the sound continues from the previous one uninterrupted. While an argument could be made that early in the movie, when we’re viewing the first SD card perhaps the people shooting the video did some editing, that’s not possible for the last approx 40 minutes or so though.

The destruction of any illusion this is found footage is far from the main issue here. Found footage or not, to be entertaining a movie has to have some kind of suspense, drama, lead up, something to excuse the set up to the ‘payoff,’ the reason you went to see it in the first place.

That just doesn’t happen here.

The set-up is you’re supposedly viewing evidence from the contents of 3 SD cards. You might as well toss out card 1 for all the interest it contains. Four somewhat likable friends hang out making a music video, sort of. They fly around and we’re treated to an earthquake, sort of, but not much else. Card 2 they’re pretty much doing the same thing while camping out in the desert somewhere. Where and why are they camping out? Who knows? Who cares? I was growing really weary of the movie by now because it hadn’t set up any expectations that there was anything at all amiss… You know, storytelling - creating tension, making you care about the characters on screen - none of that. Towards the end of card 2 there’s some weird night sounds, but more like thunder with no rain, and more to the point, no explanation.

After 2/3 of the movie goes by and you’re aching for something, ANYTHING to happen it finally does with card 3. Problem is, without any explanation or reasoning or build-up it feels more like random torture porn than it does any kind of actual horror. With very little build up all hell breaks loose quite suddenly with virtually no explanation for any of it, and for the next 40 minutes it’s blood soaked prolonged death with very little in the way of rhyme or reason, which isn’t scary, it’s disgusting. Not once was I in the least bit frightened while watching this movie, but I was plenty disgusted by the time it ended.

The overall impression was after watching about an hours worth of boring videos of some seemingly nice enough kids trying to make a music video I then watched them destroyed for no particular reason other than the filmmaker thought if I throw a lot of blood and severed organs out there and make it hard to see any of it a lot of the time by reducing your field of vision to a small shaky flashlight spot, throw in some weird screaming snakes and a guy with an ax that has no real point other than he makes a cool silhouette, I’ve created an artsy horror film.

No, you haven’t. What you’ve done is insulted your audience.

It’s too bad too because it wouldn’t’ve taken much to make this movie considerably better. Cutting the first 2/3 by half would be a good start.

Really, the only thing I found impressive here was the sound design - if you’re into that I recommend checking it out, otherwise, it’s just not ready for the big screen.