Bad acting, badly written characters. Weak as a slasher movie, simple kills with minimal makeup effects dispatched by unmenacing killers. The house in the middle of nowhere is the kind of horror movie cliché The Cabin in the Woods (2011) made fun of. A potentially interesting concept becomes dubious, potential wasted.
The story is a movie within a movie. The main characters are actors who play parts in a horror movie. Little did they know that the producers would make the horror real. One trick I did like: The movie starts out full screen, then when the actors are playing the characters in the horror movie, the screen goes letterboxed. Then when the first actor gets killed for real and the other actors realize they're in real jeopardy, the screen goes back to full screen. Neat visual trick to separate the inner movie from the outer one, the actors playing characters from them behaving in their real lives.
This is a twist on found footage, where the producers are purposely making a movie about killing off the actors in a movie. But the actors aren't in on the gag, so it's kind of reality television with deadly consequences.
The concept has potential, but the story doesn't pan out. Maybe with better writing and acting, this could have been something. Hopefully this is a stepping stone to the writer/director producing something better next time.
