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The Strings (2020)
Painful to watch, painful to hear
I like slow burn horror, but that's not what this is. At all.
The beauty of a quiet horror movie taking its time is the building tension that pulls tighter and tighter until you need it to break. Great directors know how to draw you in so you not only care about the characters, but you dread what might be coming. What they don't do is make you just watch someone silently mope, stare off into the middle distance, and scroll through pictures of themselves.
Ok, sometimes the lead makes music. And by "make music", I mean she plays two minor chords on a Casio to a lame drum machine, uses a loop pedal so poorly that it doesn't line up, then goes "ahhhhh ahhhhhh" into a microphone. I laughed out loud when she stopped moan-singing for a second and rubbed her hand on her face, then scribbled a note on a piece of paper like she was fixing a lyric. The lyrics were just "ahhhhh", so what was she writing? That said, there is some sort of poetry in the fact that her music is just two sad chords, droning on and on with nothing to hook you in. That's this movie!
Maybe the main character is a lovely person who we all should care about, but it's hard to convey that when all we see her do is act self-obsessed and bored. The rare bits of dialog are just people talking about her, but none of it is the slightest bit interesting. She has a long Skype call with a friend (now that's cinema), and she shows zero interest in the other person. They just talk about her, her music, her breakup, her photo shoot, and her room. The only redeeming thing about that scene is that it's so horribly acted that it's actually a little entertaining.
Really, don't waste your time with this one. It's not so bad it's good, just bad and boring.
Vesper (2022)
Beautiful on so many levels
This truly is the way that world-building should be done in fiction. Hint at the larger world, give us characters living in a small part of that world, then slowly give us more, piece by piece. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter all built off of that foundation, which is the reason why people were pulled in. So many corners to be explored are only barely glimpsed, and you want to know more.
Vesper pulls off the same trick. I just finished it and I want more stories in this universe. No, not like the Star Wars prequels and sequels where everything is explained, and all the intriguing possibilities are thrown out in favor of "chosen one" storylines. I want to see more about life in those citadels or the nomadic trash collectors. There's an incredible amount of imagination in this movie, from the bigger picture of the landscape down to the smallest details of the plant life. It's all so alien, yet it's simultaneously familiar as a possible future.
The narrative takes its time, and it also respects the intelligence of the audience (something that's becoming rarer these days). As I said, the world is complex, but it tells you what you need to know without exposition. I can understand why some people might be confused if they're trying to multitask while this is on. I can't judge because I started this while I was distracted by a text conversation. The movie had been on for about 15 minutes when I stopped it and started over because I had no clue what was happening. If my eyeballs were on the screen, I had no questions about what was going on.
If I have a criticism, it's that the ending was rushed. About 5 minutes before it was over, I thought it was going to have to have at least another hour to resolve. I would have been fine with that, actually. I found myself wishing it was a series rather than a movie so that it could explore more at a slower pace. The film as a whole seemed only like a first act, especially since the "call to adventure" happened in act 3.
I just wanted more, which I rarely feel while watching a movie. Highly recommend.
The Lair (2022)
Did I enjoy this?
I think I kinda liked this movie. The creatures were practical effects, which is a definite plus. It's easier to be forgiving of a great costume with some flaws than it is bad CGI. The overall vibe was sort of like Starship Troopers in a way, in that there's no way any military unit would behave like the one in this movie, but that's fine. Who really cares about that?
There's a funny thing going on where it's British and American soldiers fighting together, and they keep calling attention to it. The Americans are so obviously British actors doing bad accents, and there's even some dialog spoken by them that would never be said by any American. At one point, talking about a necklace that's important to the main character, one of them says, "I'm guessing you didn't get that out of a Christmas cookie." It was at that point that I knew there must have been zero Americans even on set to point out how that's not a thing here.
It's a fun watch. I'm not saying it's well-made or well-written or anything, because it is not, but I don't think it was trying to be anything other than what it is. It's just explosions, guns, monsters, and soldiers. If you think of it as a cross between Predator and Starship Troopers, then you'll enjoy it just fine.
Children of the Corn (2020)
Pretty bad, but not fun bad
First of all...
If you're a director on a very, very limited budget, and you end up going with a cut-rate CGI company, don't feel obligated to show their work close-up and full focus. I don't know how anyone can look at the graphic of the corn leaves shooting out of that guy's face and think it looks like anything more than a cartoon composited on top of live action. Same with the monster. It looks like the ents frim Lord of the Rings, except if the didn't bother to render any textures and lighting. It would have been scarier if it wasn't shown at all, so why make this movie even less scary by having that thing stumbling all over act 3?
The protagonist was ok for the first part of the movie, right up until the town hall meeting, which is where the movie goes off the rails. Not in a good, crazy way. Just where every character stops acting like anything resembling a human being. The protagonist's brother, who was pretty normal at the start, all of a sudden starts murdering on behalf of a kid five years younger. Why? What caused the shift? Nothing except that that layer of conflict had to happen, so they just jammed it in without any transition. And then, at the end of the movie, after he has done nothing to redeem himself for murdering their parents and trying to kill her all day, he and his sister exchange a "we're cool now" nod. They gutted people alive! No, that's not ok, bro!
The main villain is a twelve-year-old girl who becomes a cult leader overnight, despite lacking any charisma or ideology. She likes the corn I guess, but could you really get every kid in a rural town to start eviscerating people for the corn? Those kids would probably hate corn. They sure as hell wouldn't start hacking people up just because some arrogant 12-year-old said a monster in the corn was nice to her, which was apparently their whole motivation.
I felt bad for the child actors in this, because they really weren't that bad. It was just terrible writing and direction. The older girl was believable and sympathetic until her character was written to only have one note for the rest of the movie. The young cult leader was never given more than one note to work with. "Cockier! You have to be more irritating!" the director must have been screaming. But then, inexplicably, they try to have her go on a note where we'd feel kinda bad for her. Sorry, but if you want to pull that, you can't show her smirking as she's having screaming people get buried alive. You can't show her repeatedly trying to burn another kid to death for fun. We're not going to feel bad for that kid after that, even if that are an orphan.
Overall, I wish it were more incompetent so it would have at least been fun. It wasn't. I only finished watching it because it was too late to start another movie but I wasn't ready to sleep.
Final Exam (1981)
The most boring slasher I've ever seen
What most 80's slasher got wrong was that they spent almost no time with the victims so you cared about them. This one swings wildly in the other direction, spending an insane amount of time focused on a bunch of boring college students doing boring things. Yeah, there's some preposterous fraternity hazing and pranks, but somehow a pretend terrorist attack to get out of a test is a drag to watch.
I get it. It's scarier to see characters you know get stalked by a deranged killer. The problem is that these are still one dimensional characters, so the extra time we spend in their company is just tedious. We learn nothing about who they are as people, just repetitive scenes of them displaying their one character traits. Study girl always wants to study and talk about studying. Hot girl wants to talk about being hot and how that makes her life better. Pledge boy just talks about being a pledge. We don't care more about dumb jock because we saw an extra 15 minutes of him being nothing more than a dumb jock, so all that time spent was ultimately pointless. The only one we care about is Radish, who would have been a token nerd except the actor made some great choices that make him believable and sympathetic. We can overlook his coincidental obsession with murder, because the actor was able to show that its one of those neuroses that grows out of a real phobia. It's a legit performance, but it's not enough to make the movie entertaining, unfortunately. For that, you'd have to have an interesting antagonist.
That's where the movie fails big time. Spoiler: the killer is just a guy with a knife. Actually, that's not even a spoiler. It's never implied he's secretly one of the other characters, because we can see every part of him except his face, and he looks nothing like anyone we'd suspect. There's no twist when they casually stop putting his face in shadow near the end. Not that a twist is necessary, but at least give us something. What's his story? Why's he killing college students? There's not even any sort of investigation going on to fill it out.
Here's the movie: Guy kills two college students in a car. Students of nearby college hear about it, but aren't really concerned because they're taking their exams and doing frat stuff. We see them doing that for about 40 minutes. Eventually the guy from the beginning kills a few of them, then he gets killed by the girl who likes studying. Credits roll. There, that saves you 90 minutes.
Lake Placid 2 (2007)
No, they didn't really try
A lot of the reviews I just skimmed though are pretty forgiving of the effort that they put into this movie. But, in all honesty, there seems to be little effort at all.
It is great for a few things, primarily what not to do if you're a writer, director, editor, actor, or CGI artist.
First, the direction. Every scene feels like the actors were just reciting lines without any direction on how they should be saying them. Some scenes, particularly the ones with Cloris Leachman, are obviously improvisation, but just the first take where there's awkward pauses while they're trying to think of their next adlib. Also, for another great example of what bad direction looks like, pay attention to the blocking in each scene. It's the level of direction that a photographer gives for a big group photo: "squeeze in a bit...a little more...ok, you're in the shot, now stay there."
I don't know whose fault this next thing is, but almost every line from any outdoor scene is ADR'd. Badly. And almost every scene is outdoors. Did they not have a mic suitable for outdoors? Maybe they didn't realize until post-production, but, even so, at least put some effort into re-recording the dialog. Don't just put the actors in a closet with a script and a microphone and not worry whether or not they end up syncing with the footage.
The acting...you can't even really call it that. Our leading man is John Schneider, who delivers every line like he's in an oatmeal commercial. Whether he's scolding his son, flirting with his ex, or looking at severed limbs in a morgue, he has the exact same upbeat, smirking, sports announcer vibe. In fact, no one ever seems the slightest bit bothered, even when they just watched someone get bitten in half. You can tell that the only actors that thought they were making a good movie were some of the younger ones in the son's B plot. They were terrible at acting, but at least they put the effort into facial expressions.
The lone bright spot in this movie, and the reason I gave it more than one star, is the CGI. I don't think I've ever laughed that much at something that was supposed to be scary. The crocodile, which looks like a leftover render from a PS1 game, actually phases through solid objects. It hovers above the ground. It dives into the water without the slightest wave or ripple. And that's just the crocodile! There's also CGI blood spurts that are identical to the ones from the old Mortal Kombat arcade game. And they don't even bother to put any fake blood on the ground! A guy gets his arm ripped off, and the grass below him stays perfectly clean. There's a CGI seaplane too. Why? The hunters could have shown up I'm a boat, why insert a seaplane from GTA3 that, just like the croc, doesn't affect the water?
I'm torn on whether to call this thing "so-bad-it's-good". It definitely is bad enough to be entertaining, but it almost looks deliberate. It's not like Birdemic where the filmmaker thought he was doing a good job, but was just hilariously incompetent. It's more like they knew from the get-go that the script+budget were going to lead to a bad movie, so no one even tried to rise above it or even have fun with it. I'm surprised none of these experienced performers saw what they were making and went full Nick Cage.
Would I recommend it? Yeah, sorta. If you're a film student, you've got a lot of examples in here of what makes a movie terrible. There are a lot of laughs and WTF moments. If you're not entertained in the first 5 minutes though, just turn it off, because it's not going to get better.
Punisher: War Zone (2008)
Criminally underrated
I'll just say upfront: this movie is not for everyone. If you're expecting an uplifting MCU comic book movie, or even a gritty, grounded, Nolan-style film, you're probably going to be disappointed, confused, or horrified. Or possibly all of the above! The Punisher wouldn't fit into any of the existing comic book franchises, and that probably has a lot to do with why so many people didn't like it.
It's a comic book movie, for sure. The characters are over the top and the action is hilariously unrealistic, but it's source material is one of the most brutally nihilistic series put out by Marvel. The key word there being brutal, because the violence is graphic. Really really graphic. Like a Tarantino movie, the violence is intentionally taken to such an extreme that it goes from shocking to funny. Bad guys are decapitated, impaled, blown up, delimbed, shredded by glass, and one has his face completely crushed by a single punch.
All that said, it is just so fun to watch. The pace is perfect and the acting is amazing. It's so well directed and beautifully shot that it probably would have won awards if people actually got what it was going for. They knew exactly what they were doing, and the joke just went over everyone's head. Maybe it was timing. The Nolan series had just ended, so people might have expected another reality-based, gritty superhero. Nope. This has way more in common with Daredevil, just with drier humor and the 4th wall intact.
I can't recommend it enough for those that aren't bothered by a head exploding as a punchline. Go in with the understanding that Lexi Alexander saw the humor in the comic's ultra-violence, and she decided to lean into that and commit wholeheartedly. If you watch it with that attitude, you will not be disappointed.
How Did This Get Made? (2010)
The best movie podcast there is
I'm glad I didn't find this show until it had been running for 10 years, because I became quickly hooked and still haven't heard every episode.
What separates HDTGM from other Bad Movie podcasts/shows/YouTube channels is the 3 hosts. All of them are hilarious, and they've got such great chemistry that nothing ever seems forced. It's always just a natural conversation that's also very, very funny. On top of that, they're all experienced with movies and TV, either as writers, actors, or directors, so it's not unusual for them to know the people involved with the movie they watched.
If you've never listened before, I recommend starting with the Governor Gabby episode. You can watch the movie free on YouTube, and it's terrible enough to be entertaining.
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)
Might have been good if they didn't make it a Hellraiser sequel
Ok, imagine this plot summary:
A serial cheater whose wife has inherited a fortune plans to have her killed. She finds out about it, and murders him, his mistresses, and his accomplice. But that's the twist. What we see from his perspective is a surreal version where he has killed her and may be responsible for all the deaths, but, in reality, he is in hell and his experiences are just a means to torture his soul.
That could possibly be an ok movie if it had a good script, director, and cast! Instead, someone saw the draft and decided to jam it into the Hellraiser franchise. The writer obviously had trouble making that work, or they were just lazy, because the Hellraiser elements fit like a hippo in an elevator.
Pinhead and the rest of the cenobites appear here and there, mostly as hallucinations. When the twist is revealed, it goes on and on with incomprehensible flashbacks and detailed exposition that tries to shoehorn the Lament Configuration into the story. It's very close to making sense, but only if you ignore the whole Pinhead part. Since when does Pinhead use vague psychological discomfort to torture people? Sure, at the very end he does the flying chains thing, but what was the point of everything leading up to that? Was it to show Trevor the folly of his ways? Pinhead doesn't care about that, he just wants to inflict maximum physical pain on anyone who summons him. There's the same nonsense with Kirsty's character, who had been a grounded character for the first three movies. Now she's killing 5 people in horribly brutal ways?
And I have to say that Dean Winters is one of the funniest character actors now, but he was ridiculously miscast in this. I'm not sure if he's capable of many facial expressions that don't involve a slight smirk, so his reaction to some heavy duty horrors rarely rises above bemusement. It's actually kind of funny in the scenes where he's face-to-face with a cenobite, and he looks like he's thinking, "what's up with this idiot?"
Anyway, skip this one unless you're really bored and you're trying to watch all the Hellraiser movies.
Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)
Better than it looks!
Watching Hellraiser: Bloodline and this back-to-back, I was expecting that the franchise's first direct-to-DVD installment would be even more amateurish and embarrassing than its predecessor. Boy was I surprised!
Don't get me wrong, it's not a good movie by most standards, but it does stand out among the Hellraiser sequels. It has a real story, and even delves into some larger themes of morality, justice, and regret that most of the franchise would be incapable of expressing coherently.
Joseph Thorne is a corrupt, narcissistic detective who appears skilled at his job, but has no reservations about stealing from evidence, brutalizing suspects (and informants), or manipulating crime scenes. His partner of 6 months admires his intelligence and the two have a running game of wordplays going as they do their job. Thorne has a wife and daughter who we rarely see, mainly because he neglects them in favor of hookers and cocaine. His rationale is that most marriages end in divorce, so if he gets to have fun on the side while his wife is unaware, then everyone stays happy. He's somehow oblivious that his wife is painfully aware while his daughter is heartbroken over his constant absence.
The morning after one of his nights with a prostitute, Thorne opens the Lament Configuration (which he stole from a crime scene) in the motel bathroom. In the previous Hellraiser movies, that would have ended with him being ripped apart and damned to hell, but here he only gets a brief surreal tour of a hell dimension that is based more on his memories. As the day goes on, the people he knows start dying in horrific ways, and his investigation points to a mysterious suspect known only as "The Engineer". Meanwhile, the people around him see him growing more detached from reality by the minute, as he raves about this "Engineer" that none of them have heard of.
The production quality for most of the movie is comparable to a late night Cinemax soft-core. The cinematography and lighting are flat, boring, and devoid of any style, generally looking like the cheap direct-to-DVD movie that it is. There is a turn, however, as the movie gets closer to the climax and it becomes more dream-like. The special effects aren't amazing, but they wisely chose to rely more on practical effects used sparingly (the SFX budget was only $50k), and they end up looking better than Bloodline's much more expensive effects.
I can't praise the acting as much as other reviewers, even by the normally dependable Craig Sheffer as the lead. During the portions of the movie that are supposed to be more grounded, he comes across as a parody of the Film Noire detective trope. But as the character becomes more unhinged, his performance improves exponentially. The supporting cast are mostly terrible, with the too-old-to-be-acting-like-a-toddler daughter standing out as the worst. Chalk that up to miscasting though.
Overall, it has a ton of flaws, but it's an effective mashup of detective mystery and horror. I was entertained from start to finish, engaged with the story, and impressed with what they were able to do with so little. Most of the scariest parts are more existentially horrifying than gory, and that kind of horror sticks with you much longer.
Monster (2022)
Well done miniseries with some glaring faults
Taken on its own without the historical context, this biopic of an extremely disturbed and destructive person is an excellent production. The acting, writing, direction, and cinematography are all top notch, and you can't ignore the skill and creativity that went into this.
The problem, however, is we're watching the story of a man whose crimes affect still-living people, which should necessitate a higher standard of accuracy.
I'm not one of those people who are triggered by anything that points out systemic racism, sexism, bigotry, or homophobia and start mindlessly screaming about some "woke agenda" like I've been personally attacked. Those conditions did help Jeffrey Dahmer get away with his crimes for much longer than would be possible if the victims and witnesses were of another demographic. There was little to no investigation of the men and boys who went missing, and the reasons for police inaction were inarguably the result of biased attitudes.
That said, I found it extremely inappropriate that they chose to distill the experience of the black community into one character who is in fact a real person. Biopics regularly combine multiple individuals into one to represent a larger group. It's a standard way to limit the number of characters or emphasize a theme. It makes certain sense in this story to do that here, but the mistake they made was in mish-mashing real events with fictional ones and applying them all to one person.
Glenda Cleveland is a real person who played a role in just one of the horrifying stories of Jeffrey Dahmer and the dereliction of law enforcement. To fictionalize the entire experience of the neighborhood and place it all on one still-living person is irresponsible and lazy. It undermines much of the truth of how race played a role by inserting racially tinged events that never took place. That doesn't serve to highlight those truths; it only invites claims of an agenda.
The other very distasteful choice was inventing a romance between Dahmer and his victim Tony Hughes prior to his murder. Little is known about the connection between the two of them other than that some of Tony's friends say that they knew each other and may have slept together before. Dahmer referred to him as "the deaf mute", and didn't seem to have any sort of emotional attachment to him beyond coveting his body. It almost seemed like a means to stretch the story out and give some humanity to Dahmer, and that's a piss poor way to treat Tony Hughes' life and the family that still mournes him.
Finally, the treatment of Dahmer's parents' stories kicks the feet out from under any semblance of credibility that the makers may have wanted. They quite clearly wanted an answer to "why", and their path to getting there was by inventing things out of whole cloth that could point to his parents. Did they play a role in what he turned out to be? Yes, of course. But you don't need to make things up to support that conclusion, nor would any regular child have become that depraved even in this fictionalized version of his upbringing. He and his father didn't bond over dissecting roadkill, so why pretend they did? What does that serve?
The show has little faith in the audience's intelligence, and shows that by engaging in the sort of storytelling that hammers its point home with recognizable cliches rather than showing what really happened. The question of how nature and/or nurture created such a monster isn't answered, so let your audience reach their own conclusions based on the facts. The racial component of the story is complex. Don't simplify it because you think it makes the narrative stronger.
Dahmer's victims were and are real-life human beings, so tell us their stories and try to be faithful to their legacies. There's just too much poetic injustice in manipulating their lives to serve Jeffrey Dahmer.
Hellraiser (2022)
It was...okayish? But mostly bad.
One of the things about the original Hellraiser that made it unique, and ultimately made it timeless, was that watching it leaves you feeling dirty, uncomfortable, and a disturbed.
After watching this, there's no residual feelings at all. Nothing stays with you, and you quickly forget the characters and plot.
On the plus side, they avoided many of the tropes of recent big budget horror. Cheap surface level jump scares and CGI monsters jittering towards the camera are pushed aside in favor of atmosphere and attempts at tension building. The problem is that those attempts are mostly failures.
Successful tension building in horror means stretching that tension past the point it should break, then stretching it a little further before it's released. Think of the original Halloween, which pulls the viewer to the point where they're hoping for the tension to end, then they are pulled past that point where they don't want it anymore. They're scared of what will break the tension.
This new Hellraiser can't help but break the tension every few minutes. It establishes an atmosphere of mysterious horror, only to show you a clear, bright view of the monsters a few minutes later. You're never required to use your imagination, which would definitely be more horrifying than what's shown on screen.
The best example of this is the inciting moment where the lead character's brother disappears. The movie is essentially us following along as the rest of the cast is trying to figure out what happened to him. But the viewers already know. We didn't see it directly, but he was cut by the box, and we saw the consequences of that in the first few minutes.
In fact, those opening scenes are what undermine the first and second acts. If you cut those out, we only know that the box was hidden away and protected, and that it's probably magical in some evil way. We'd know the brother disappeared, but like the main characters, we wouldn't know if he was alive or dead. We'd empathize with them more because we'd be discovering the nature of the box along with them. Their horrors would then be our horrors, and every moment leading up to those would be all the more dreadful. Instead, we're just waiting for them to catch up to what we already know. We know what the box summons, and we know the person whose blood was spilled is then tortured and mutilated in some alternate dimension.
However, cutting out the opening scenes would do nothing to improve act 3, in which the Cenobites--supernatural demons with nearly unlimited powers--are milling around in a yard because they've been locked out of the mansion. One of them is even stuck in a door, like he's a ordinary zombie or something. Then there's the "twist", which makes barely any sense in the context of the character's actions throughout the rest of the movie. There's no "aha!" moment. Just a "wait...why?" moment.
The performances are pretty good. They're mostly naturalistic aside from the primary (human) antagonist. The direction isn't bad at all. The script is mostly serviceable aside from the problems I listed above. The cinematography is the weakest technical link. Everything is too well lit, clear, and static. I don't know the cinematographer's resume, but it doesn't look like the work of someone that understands how to shoot horror.
Overall, I'd only recommend it as a blandly entertaining time waster.
Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005)
So bad it's almost good
If one of the death scenes in a horror movie makes you laugh so hard your stomach hurts, then it's either doing something really right or really wrong. Maybe a little of both. I just watched thousands of CGI spiders crawl out of a CGI pimple on a girl's face until she broke a CGI mirror and ripped her own face off with CGI glass. It was...amazing?
The producers must have figured computers had reached the point in 2005 where practical effects of any kind were unnecessary, so they went all in on budget iMacs to take care of all the blood, makeup, and props.
The disappointing part was that they tried to have a twist that was telegraphed in the first 5 minutes. Stepdad that the teenage kids hate? Nah, he won't be the bad guy. Too obvious. Oh, wait, he's checking out that teenager's butt. Now he can't be a good guy!
I gave it 1 star because I don't think they meant to make a comedy, so it failed its mission.
Creep (2014)
A rare decent found footage movie
Found footage movies almost have a catch 22 built right into the concept. Since they're meant to look like home movies, they don't require the production values of traditional studio releases, which means they usually have an extremely low budget. On the flip side, they're meant to look completely natural so suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain. Scripted performances by mediocre actors stick out like sore thumbs when they're recorded with what's meant to be a home movie setup.
This is why I generally avoid the genre. Even the best found footage movies have a moment where the characters' behavior screams "I'm performing" in a way that you'd never see in real life, and it pulls me completely out of the show. There's also the well-documented challenge of explaining the constant recording and seemingly endless battery life of the camera.
Creep does it better than most, in that the performances are improvised in a somewhat believable way. When one character beginning to suspect that the other may be unstable, there are awkward silences as they try to measure what they say. No one engages in any scripted monologs to explain the plot for you. In fact, you never really learn who Josef is besides the fact that he's doen this numerous times. A lot is left in the dark, which makes the whole thing that much more unsettling.
Now for the bad parts...
There are a lot of moments where you have to ask, "why is this being recorded?" They don't try to explain it, which is probably for the best, but it really is glaring at times.
The main character, Aaron, has very little character development, so it's hard to understand his motivations (or lack thereof). He calls the cops once to report a stalker, downplays it to the operator, and then immediately gives up when they don't take it seriously.
All in all, it's an ok horror movie with good performances, while simultaneously being an above average found footage movie with exceptional performances.