As the old truism goes, write what you know, advice that YouTube movie critic Chris Stuckmann follows for the opening 20 minutes or so of his debut horror feature. Making fairly good use of the found footage device that made The Blair Witch Project a phenomenon 25 years ago, he sets up a situation that immediately draws the audience in: A quartet of online ghostbusters who have garnered a loyal and growing following go missing while investigating an abandoned prison for evil spirits on the outskirts of the town of Shelby Oaks, which has also been abandoned. Eventually, the mutilated bodies of three of the members are found in a vacant house, and the search for the remaining member, Riley Brennan (Sarah Dunn), intensifies. All this background is presented in the form of mock footage of news reports, the final creepy tape the group shot at the prison, and a documentary about Riley’s older sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), who, as the film opens, says she still believes her sister is alive twelve years after the disappearance. Then, in the movie’s only truly original scene, a guy comes to her door while the doc crew is there and blows his brains out, at which point the opening credits roll and the movie descends into total mediocrity.

The dead guy had come bearing further clues into Riley’s disappearance, clues that Mia hides from the police because, as she tells her skeptical husband (Brendan Sexton III), once the police get hold of this evidence they’ll close the case, and she intends to keep following it until she finds Riley herself. Though Stuckmann, with the help of his able cinematographer, Andrew Scott Baird, ramps up the suspense as Mia reexplores the decaying prison and overgrown amusement park that was once Shelby Oaks’ main attraction, the story gets way too literal with its boogeyman aspects, and once the reasons for Riley’s disappearance and related supernatural shenanigans are revealed in tortuous detail the whole movie becomes a parody of itself.

In the end, Stuckmann returns temporarily to the mock documentary style, and in doing so regains some of his atmospheric footing, thus proving that he knows how media works, having himself become a digital media star through careful exploitation of algorithms and clicks; but he didn’t learn as much as he thinks he did through his film review gig except how to stage a jump scare. Despite all the narrative huffing and puffing involved to create a twisty horror flick, the plot doesn’t make much sense under scrutiny and, despite the brief running time, it feels overextended, but that may have more to do with the end credits, which go on forever since Stuckmann has to mention all the people who contributed to the film’s Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, something he obviously has more practical knowledge about than making horror movies. 

Opens Dec. 12 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Shelby Oaks home page in Japanese

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