Flirted with being really good.

The first 1/3 to maybe about the halfway point the movie was actually really good, and did some creative things.

The premise as to why they're there, and why they keep filiming is better than most found footage films. I liked how they used the television intro to sneak in the title crawl,I always like when film makers incorporate the title into the film's universe with guile (like "Boogie Nights", or "You're Next"). Showing the fakeness of reality TV was fun in the beginning too, paying off the caretaker, the awkwardness of the caretaker, and faking the medium in the Houston character. Even acknowledging how hokey the spray painted "Death Awaits" thing is.

Once the *beep* hits the fan though, the film quickly deteriorates. I feel they tried way too hard to scare with visuals, and over-sold many of the set-ups. I feel ghosts snd ghouls are better left subtle, rather than full on showing them, then distorting their faces with a horrible sound effect that takes me out of the movie. The bathtub scare was brutally ruined by over selling it. You already set up the story earlier in the film twice (once with the caretaker, once with Houston). Then we see the bathtub full of blood, and instead of respecting the audiences intelligence, they have to state there's blood in the tub, then have a hackneyed reason for the characters to get close to it.

Even when the tongue is found we hear, "What's that?", which is all we need to hear, but of course the character has to explicitly state that it's a tongue because we're too stupid to figure it out. Furthermore; the ghosts/ghouls look bad, the eye make-up was way too much and took me out of the film.

The only effective death in the movie was Houston, even though they kind of messed it up. Seeing him being lifted, and suffocated while we know he's in pitch black was really terrifying, but then instead of letting that be the death he gets dropped, then launched forward 15 feet and that's how the film chooses to let him die?

I wont go on with too many more nit picks, but I do feel the film fell flat on it's themes. There's clearly this metaphor of psychiatric hospitals being the cause of some mental illness , or mental breaks in people, through abuse, but the message is muddled and doesn't work in the film. Them randomly waking up with hospital bracelets, as well as the forced, horrible "crazy" laughter many characters take part in were just silly. I get it, and appreciate the effort, but that just came off as corny, not scary.