Where to begin... The acting in this movie is pretty bad. Like, some of them have their moments where the acting isnt COMPLETE trash, but generally it is very amateurish. For a horror film where reactions need to feel genuine, this movie fail miserably. If you saw one of your buddies... roasted to death in a fire, lets say (I used that example specifically b/c it doesnt happen in this film and I dont wanna use spoilers) you would rightfully freak the eff out!... these people are basically just like "aw, bummer. Oh well, let's gtfo i guess" (not an actual quote lol) It's ALMOST laughably bad - but this movie doesnt even give you that.
This movie almost doesnt even have a plot. The story development this film does have ranges from very bland to very weird and at times, down right silly.
As bad as the plot is, the character development (or lack of) is actually even worse. Not only are the characters mostly all flat and boring, they also dont grow AT ALL throughout the entire movie. By the end, I was praying for them to all die horribly. They deserve it for sucking so much. lol.
The one character who wasnt painfully boring was the main character - but that's only because of how unfathomably aggrevating she was. If I'm being honest, she kind of reminded me of a year-one-Hermione-Granger but somehow way more annoying. "It's levi-OH-saw, not levi-oh-SAW!"
And each character was intensly stupid. Especially the main character, who didnt really seem to know why she was so sure ghost videos were fake other than "because science" and "because of course they are" (I'm paraphrasing). She also may have cited youtube as a scientific source at one point... lol. She was a freakin' moron. Par for the course with this movie's characters, unfortunately.
This movie's greatest weakness tbh is probably the script. It is just fundamentally bad. The actor's lines, the plot, the premise, the potencially interesting back story for the haunted mansion and ghost thing that roams the halls that never really gets fleshed out in any meaningful way... the script is just bad.
The ONE thing that was REMOTELY scary or thrilling or w/e was the creepy music/sound effects. They had some good creepy demoinic noises and children's whispers and laughter and stuff that was I guess we are to assume was picked up by the camera's recordings but not heard out loud (they never reacted to the noises).
The only problem with this feature is unfortunatley they played these noises continuously until it just became background noise. The creepy noises werent used sparingly to accentuate the atmosphere. Instead it was plastered over the whole latter half of the film and it was thought - I assume - that the more creepy noises you have = more scarey... lol. Not so.
To describe what the effect was like without making you watch the film, imagine playing one of those halloween spooky noise recordings people play to make their front yard creepy for the trick-or-treaters... now imagine you're playing 3 of those recordings simultaneously over top of each other for about an hour, and you pretty much know what i'm talking about here.
The last thing I'm going to mention, I dont think this is a spoiler, I'm just going to say... guns have ammo. Ammo is a thing that exists. That's it. I'll leave it at that.
This movie is terrible. It's not even bad enough to be good. it's just bad.
