Victor_Fallon

Do not watch this on headphones, unless you like ripping them off your head and throwing them across the room as the entire cast of kids have the most annoying high-pitched screams, turned up to 11, complete with excrutiatingly loud banging noises instead of a proper soundtrack.

This is a poorly directed movie about some kids at summer camp where nothing is as it seems. The story has some pretty good ideas. It's a shame it takes so long to get going and it ends just as it gets interesting.

It's a not wholly original, but it's a sci-fi tale with a lot of potential for a rewrite and remake. In more experienced hands, this could be filled with existential dread. As it stands, it's filled with piercing audio, sluggish pacing and tropes aplenty.

It looks great and sounds great, but really I struggled with this one. First, I'm not American and found the olde-worlde mumbly southern accents unintelligible. Thankfully, the visual storytelling was good enough to make the story coherent, kinda. It's just not a very good story.

The acting is generally good, but the cast spend most of the movie not doing very much. Scene after scene of cliched dialogue, stock characters and recycled tropes that don't really go anywhere. When things finally kick off, we get rewarded with a bunch of continuity errors and sloppy editing.

The soundtrack does a lot of heavy lifting. Somewhere in here is a bold attempt to make a crowd-pleasing movie and it shines through in a couple of scenes, but the rest of the movie is, unfortunately, insanely boring.

The game has a better cast, a better story, better direction,, better sound, better editing and better lighting.

It was already an interactive movie. So they took that and put it through Mr Sandbergh's automatic slop machine to produce a one of the blandest cinema experiences imaginable.

The writers are artless spin-off hacks, yes, but the director and producers are mostly to blame. I wish I could defend the cast, but it's one of those movies that has no characters in it and none of the actors hired seem capable of creating one. There are human-shaped people moving around on the screen, but nobody knows why.

The first section plays out like a generic horror movie that could have been dumb fun, but then everything stops. It's like they didn't expect anybody to last more than 30 minutes and so didn't bother filming anything interesting.

It's very PG-13, which is fine and could have been a great gateway horror, but the script is almost entirely made up of the F-word. Every single character responds to every situation by saying 'WTF' again and again and again. It's truly moronic down to its very bones.

I didn't like it.