A stipulation in a client’s will has a lawyer offering the inheritance of a million-dollar home to anyone who can spend a night in an infamous home and assist in disproving any spooky bullshit. A fine and familiar idea for a horror film if you have a cast and crew and a general idea of how to piece together a film. Yeah. We are in some very strange waters. The lawyer (writer/director/producer/search-engine-abuser Richard Heard) delivers this message via video call and his lovely cat makes a cameo. He assures the kitty that he will not be inheriting the home. Low-grade digital effects and (I believe) an AI Dia de Los Muertos woman pop up before an insane woman is seen roaming the halls of the spooky digital interiors. The lawyer slowly reads his script and continues on with the rules of the will. I guess a cleaning crew made claims of the supernatural but the lawyer and his associates will not verify these claims and outright disclaim them. We then cut to handheld camera footage of some dude looking around a home, this then cuts to more digital shots of an abandoned insane asylum, followed by tentacles, followed by a woman in caked on white makeup, followed by a shadow, followed by a (possibly AI) person wagging his finger while wearing a light-up mask, followed by spooky pictures that I’m shocked don’t contain watermarks from the Google search used to find them. That crazy lady comes back briefly and then an establishing shot of a rundown house happens and we see the lawyer fixing his tie and staring at a camera. There’s litigation about murder and injury by ghosts and it seems that the lawyer is pretty cocky about anyone being able to prove that. More image search results (Silent Hill nurses) and random footage plays out. Creative madman Richard Heard has released something that feels like a Halloween-obsessed search engine was given life and then told to produce a stream of consciousness meditation on its directive. Heard’s time in front of the camera is as awkward as one would expect when it comes to a sentient program’s belief of what a human acts like and his continual one-man ramblings of the plot (in front of a wood-paneled wall whilst adjusting his glasses, in a rundown backyard and in a basement bar that I’ve seen in several family photographs from the 1960s) and whatever tangent he decides to focus on are a nice break from the barrage of copyrighted images, random video and generated scenes that only sometimes have anything to do with whatever story may or may not be going on. It’s like a ghost story being told by a socially awkward uncle who is also really fucking hammered. I mean, he says going up against him in a court of law is like going up against a mandrill, a hungry mandrill who is ready to eat you… it then cuts to footage of a mandrill yawning. I can’t make this shit up because nobody would give a damn if I was. A vanity project from somebody who can’t comprehend what vanity is? A brief confrontation with a campfire story that fades in and out of reality along with the storyteller’s interest? A memory of every horror production company’s title screen? A glimpse into the gestation of an idea from a man who wants to be a lawyer way more than he wants to be a horror filmmaker? A boredom-laced drug overdose during a Halloween-themed ChatGPT spiral disguised as a Philadelphia fright flick? A script written around images and videos in a saved folder on a beat up laptop? A complete fucking head trip and if you’re in the right frame of mind, you may fucking fall in love. I did. But even with all that love, it will break you down by the time the end comes along at just a little over the longest hour you’ve ever experienced.
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