This one is a very fragile idea, with a seemingly complicated plot that could be executed phenomenally.
This film failed miserably.
Using the framing device of a cable news expose', we're told of a CIA program using people with psychic abilities of some sort being teleported to alternate "planes of existence" to stop evil inhuman creatures from trying to invade our plane of existence. We follow a mission that ended in abysmal failure and led to the entire program's cancellation, via camera footage taken by the psychic teens themselves and in the facility from the handlers.
Right away the first failing of the film is how it actually handles the alternate planes of existence and how to put the people in them. They don't do anything original or interesting; the teens go to sleep with electrodes on their head, and basically "dream" everything.
Almost to a person, the acting is among the absolute worst I've ever seen, even reaching the level of middle schoolers sight-reading Shakespeare in first year English. EVERYONE is at their absolute worst, delivering lines like they're reading them for the first time ever and essentially guessing as to the context or tone of them.
there are two of CIA handlers voices, Alpha and Delta. The voice of Delta is literally someone putting on the most cartoonishly over the top "redneck" accent they can muster while still sounding serious, and Alpha sounds like a 15 year old reading lines from an NPC in a poorly written RPG game.
Speaking of NPCs in poorly written RPG games, at one point for seemingly no reason at all, we get an audio clip of a "resident mortician" from the alternate plane, and to call what he did "acting" is to call smeared fish guts baked into concrete by the sun "gourmet sushi".
Apparently drawing their inspiration from Vincent Price, they give a painfully bland monologue describing some manner of creature eating corpses in a funeral home with the sort of purple prose of a drunken teenager mockingly imitating Edgar Allen Poe. It is the epitome of every bad "creepy sinister old man" NPC voice in every poorly written computer RPG voiced by one of the production assistants with no acting experience at all.
Virtually every aspect of this short, short film is an abject failure. The story is incoherent and constantly interrupted by Beavis and Butthead (Alpha and Delta) droning moronically like pubescent teenagers trying to scare children with deep, ultra serious voices. All the video footage is heavily grained and distorted, the CG effects for the monsters literally look like they were made in MS Paint, and the sound mixing is some of the absolute worst of any movie I've ever heard, with some characters sounding like they have microphones, and others not. Some lines are barely audible, then other lines, usually curse words, are ear-splittingly loud, sometimes in the same sentence.
Nothing in this film went right. The writing, the acting, the visual effects, even the most basic stuff like sound. All of it failed abysmally, to such a colossal degree that, seeing positive reviews of this film praising the visual effects, of all things, genuinely makes me think those reviews are planted by the filmmakers. And I have almost never come across a movie review I have suspected of being a fake.
