Found footage anthology uses an intriguing wraparound story and some enjoyable spookers to stand out among a subgenre littered with plenty of the same old, same old. Police officer Leo Cole responds to a bizarre call involving an infamous house. A witness claims that the home where a young girl murdered her family and herself has suddenly reappeared one year after it was demolished. Sure enough, the house is inexplicably there and Officer Cole heads in to investigate. He finds a tape marked “The Fear Footage” in a VCR and pops it on in. We then witness three tales which make up the content of the tape, all seen through the eye of his body cam. So it’s a bit of found footage witnessed through the lens of found footage. In The Birthday Party, a ten year old boy films a confrontation with a possibly supernatural clown the night before his party. This is the weakest of the entries and is nearly sunk completely by piss-poor acting and a lack of excitement. There’s a few fine moments but it’s mostly a waste of time. In Storm Stalkers a trio of storm chasers, filming their latest adventure for a web series, take a wrong turn and accidentally run over a man who appears out of nowhere. This proves to be the least of their problems when a black-robed cult begins chasing after them and ends up leading them to a labyrinthine abandoned building where a black mass has been performed and something monstrous has been unleashed. Fast paced and fun, Storm Stalkers proves to be the best of the bunch. The third and final story is Speak No Evil and it involves a recovering drug addict looking to prove to his girlfriend that he hasn’t relapsed by filming proof of the strange noises he’s hearing at night from the woods right outside the back of his apartment. He turns up some disturbing history about massacred children, an abandoned church and a connection to his past that may just cost him his life. It gets a little goofy at the climax but it’s no cinematic sin and it doesn’t shamble around long enough to be offensive. Throughout the viewing of the tape, Officer Cole does some investigating and slowly peels away at the horrible secret within the house. He soon comes into contact with whatever presence was left behind and finds himself trapped. Everything moves by at a clip and there’s some wonderfully realized (if slightly goofy looking) entities haunting the film’s runtime. Outside of the first story, I enjoyed everything and if you got an itch for shaky-cam horrors you could do a lot worse.
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