Destroy This Tape (2025) (Canada)

⭐️1/2

A destroyed campsite and a camcorder is all that remains of a group of five youths who decided to go on a camping trip in the Alpine Oaks Provincial Park. This camcorder was used to document the whole trip of a final gathering for the whole gang before one of their number heads out to travel the world and this footage displays the awfulness that came their way. We see it all in its worn out videotape glory. A sudden downpour has them fleeing and breaking into a lakeside cabin they come across. An uneventful night has them confident enough to stay in the cabin and then the next night things get chaotic. One of the guys thinks he hears someone struggling in the lake and jumps in and then one of girls becomes violently ill. It’s not long before corpses are popping up. It’s at this point we cut to an author interviewing the camerawoman’s mother and it’s filmed standardly which just drags you out of the found footage dramatics. The dude is kind of a prick and gets his hands on the tape so he can see what happened to the missing kids. He heads out to the area where they disappeared. After not getting much from the locals, he decides to take a look around Alpine Oaks and it goes about as well as you would expect. He too crashes in the cabin and even finds a corpse of the dink who jumped in the water but he treats it like another day at the office. He may be a bit of a sociopath. He finds one of the girls alive and wandering the woods, bringing her back to the cabin and trying to get information out of her. She wants to leave but he thinks he and his gun are enough to protect her but the cabin’s owner arrives and tells them they can spend the night because it’s impossible to make your way out of the woods once darkness falls. Some snooping leads to a disturbing discovery and a general lack of any satisfaction. The wrinkle of the switch up between filming styles and narrative is fine but just ends up feeling like you’re sitting through another movie that’s not all that good which just runs its way to an ending that mostly sucks.