Sometimes you get lucky with small budget films and you get something cheesy but good in a cheesy way. Take Silent Night, Deadly Night back in the day. Sometimes, you have to settle for friends or untried actors with a not-too-good script, a not-too good director and a god-awful sound mixer and editor.
This is, sadly, one of the latter. The timing was slow, the scenes had a lot of long pauses as if they were hoping that would make the movie long enough to be useful with waaay too little script.
The leads were unbelievable, unlikeable, with no reason to cheer for them, and in all honesty, the little kids probably did the best acting in the movie.
And as other's mentioned, the movie just suddenly wrapped-up really quickly and you don't even care about the ending since you never liked the leads in the first place.
That popping/crackling soundtrack is always a sign of a bad movie. You can hear it often in another clunker "The Eaters".
I've seen student films and Youtube videos using DSLR cameras that were shot better, sounded better, written better, acted better, directed better, edited better, and were, in general, just better.
