It’s V/H/S on a budget with even more needlessly complicated framing! Oddly enough, I saw the sequel before seeing this one and remember not being impressed and slightly confused. But I’m an idiot so it’s probably not creator Jack Hunter’s fault. Anyways, some dope in a mask trying his damndest (failing spectacularly) to do a Heath Ledger and Mark Hamill Joker impression introduces the film proper, complaining about some Facebook idiot putting all the tapes they have been pirating online. Awful Joker claims his minions have infiltrated his Facebook group and have reported him to the FBI. It may be one of the worst openings I have ever fucking seen. Luckily, it ends before I bash my head into the wall and some text appears on the screen about three people being found dead in upstate New York. Their unsolved deaths have been a mystery until now because someone turned in a video camera purchased at a thrift store. I once purchased an old camcorder at a thrift store but it wouldn’t even turn on so I have no idea if it would have helped to solve a cold case. We have footage of some teenagers being annoying and deciding to pull a prank on a girl. This prank involves a fake date and a spooky surprise where the lead derp will dress up as a killer and scare the hell out of the target. She’s not one to be pranked and shows herself to be something supernaturally dangerous. It’s brief so it’s not insulting or anything but it doesn’t feel much like anything. A guy named Henry talks about his missing dad and brother and how people warned him that there is stuff going on he wouldn’t understand. He claims he has found a bunch of tapes and decides to share the footage he has come across. I guess we’re falling down into another level of the found footage hell we’ve found ourselves in. A mother at the end of her rope talks about wanting her constantly wailing baby daughter to die. The baby doesn’t listen to her pleads of “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” so she throws some pills into her milk. Deciding not to give her the milk, she walks offscreen and some disturbing sounds lead to a quiet baby. The mother comes back on the screen and has black demon eyes and an upside down cross painted in blood on her throat. Great. Short but pointless. Some blonde chick goes to lend her camera to her creepy neighbor Ronnie who wants to shoot a porno with her. She ain’t into it and leaves. Great. Glad they caught that on camera. We then jump to footage of a woman beating her boyfriend to death with a baseball bat (offscreen) before he leaves for the military. We’re only twenty minutes in and I am fucking annoyed. There’s also a group of unlikable female interns encountering a cult of cheaply dressed idiots, more time with Ronnie being called out for being a pervert in a rambling bit of film that numbs the ass, another level of discovered Betamax tapes leading to another level of found footage tedium, two middle-aged brothers plotting some terrorist bullshit, a college student researching some unsolved murders for a class final/documentary (you know where this is going), more bullshit from the ass-stain Joker prick, some dopes looking into a haunted abandoned church (footage I have seen before under the title Worst Nightmare, I liked it), more teens filming their own demises and then the unfortunate answer to what’s going on with Ronnie. There may be more but I’ve given up. The college kid making the documentary segment is old hat but handled well by the teenagers and features a scene in a library that had me chuckling pretty hard… I think that was its aim. The haunted church is a fun time and then Slenderman shows up to take out some abrasive teenage boys. It’s a disjointed mess for most of the runtime and it’s littered with a bunch of slappable people but there are a few knockoff gems in the large pile of first-person excrement.
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