alansmithee04

It's hard to overstate how gut-wrenchingly incompetent this film is. It looks like the final project of a student at an unaccredited film school. Specifically, a student who sat dozing in the back of the classroom while zonked out on cough syrup.

The film is about a demon haunted storage facility. The story lines of three groups of characters exploring the place are not so much intertwined as put in a bucket and mashed together with a toilet plunger, creating a confusing mess whose only positive outcome is to obscure the film's insipid plot. As the victims are picked off by the POV monster (fortunately never seen) we're treated to endless repeats of the last scene of "Rec", which might make for an interesting drinking game, but only if Thorazine were used instead of alcohol.

The main group of characters appear to be three hapless college age kids (Stringy Hair, Mr. Eyebrows and The Girl) who go on a treasure hunt in the aforementioned storage building. Their story is inter-cut with the two other groups, a widower and his dude-bro friend and a pair of women who (bewilderingly) resemble a young Melissa Etheridge and Cher. All three groups wander through poorly titled scenes edited by an old copy of Windows Movie Maker until the POV monster shows up to end their misery.

All-in-all, this is the kind of movie I would have made if I'd been a 16 year old death-metal fan with a serious head wound. Maybe the guys at Rifftrax could do something with it, but I doubt that even they could make this train wreck entertaining.

Since they advertised this film as a "horror comedy" it might have been nice if the film makers had indeed included some horror and some comedy. Unfortunately all we get here is a few half-drawn characters and a sparse handful of horror movie clichés.

Long story short - an annoying New York couple stay at a B&B run by an annoying old woman and her dull son. There they play with their cell phones and tablets, meet a boring Swedish butterfly collector and then play with their electronic toys some more.

Once the "horror" starts, it's really hard to care about the fate of these dullards. But don't worry, they don't seem to care much either. And by the time this excursion into ennui sputters to a halt with all the impact of a wet firecracker, neither do we.

Not a found footage movie, but rather a movie based upon what's become one of the more standard found footage movie plots. What am I talking about? Only this...

Pennhurst is about a group of obnoxious teens who go to an abandoned mental hospital to screw around. While there, the most obnoxious of the bunch tells the story of a TV "ghost hunting" crew who visited that selfsame hospital and were brutally murdered. Pretty standard, yes? No! This film doesn't even try to maintain the found footage conceit. Badly chosen music, meant to be scary I suppose, crops up on the soundtrack throughout. And speaking of scary, there ain't none. Maybe two or three scenes, all of them staring the film's director/star Michael Rooker, could be considered at all scary and then only if they were taken out of context with rest of the film.

If Pennhurst has a saving grace, it's that at least the cast looked like they were having fun shooting it. Which is good, because I doubt anyone else will enjoy it as much.