To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: Any movie sufficiently bad is indistinguishable from satire
Just saw this for the first time and couldn't finish it. Not just because of the content, it's messed up but I've gotten through several torture porn movies in the past. It's just very incompetently made
Most of the shots are visually dull and, like you said, the killer is a ridiculous Mary Sue. All of the interviewees are gargling his balls harder than any of his victims. It's like the writers read a couple of books on serial killers and thought that if they cherrypicked enough details they could form the "perfect" serial killer. Asinine details like "he scattered body parts across several counties. This killer REALLY understands bureaucracy". It would take a level of restraint to make writing this purposefully bad without any sort of wink at the audience. Somehow I don't think the writers are that disciplined
And if you look at the rest of the filmography of the Dowdle Brothers you will see consistent mediocrity and lack of subtlety
I think what I found most offensive was that they aimed for a certain level of verisimilitude with the found-footage, mockumentary style, but then were too lazy to really give attention to the little details: the interviewees had generic titles like "police officer", "FBI field agent", "mutilation expert". No serious documentary would give such broad, meaningless pieces of information to the main contributors of information. It's like the writers couldn't be bothered to do enough research on how criminal investigations are carried out in real life to give us those details. Compare this with any semi-competent police procedural and you'll see that they're rife with jargon and actual official ranks/titles. Those silly descriptions would MAYBE be an indication of satire if the Dowdles hadn't taken a similarly lazy approach in their movie "No Escape", in which the name of the country or political context of the chaos are never stated
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