It's everything wrong with post-2000 Hollywood horror, thrown in a blender and regurgitated in barely interactive form. It's Blair Witch 2 meets Saw, and someone forgot to screw the lid on tight on the jumpscare shaker (look no further than a raccoon jumping out of a cupboard for the level of quality we are dealing with here).

The cast is incredibly uneven, starting with Peter Stormare, miscast with his thick Danish accent making him sound funny more than scary. The guy they replaced him with for the anthology sequels was an incredible step up and definitely the high point of those disappointing messes.

It also features the worst series of plot twists ever seen anywhere: three of them, not only they are incredibly easy to call from ten miles away, but they also consistently blueball the player by doing absolutely nothing with the revelations, de facto negating what little good there is to find in the way they attempt to subvert audience expectations. Absolutely abject narrative failure at its finest.

Points awarded at least for very basic but ultimately acceptable creature survival action and a good polyphonic rendition of the folk song "O Death".

Give this a pass unless you really enjoy the braindead cinematic material it draws from.

Reviewed on Sep 22, 2022


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