Stoker Hills

If you can endure the first 15 minutes of found footage material without getting seasick (or irritated), and you don't mind a farfetched and illogical story, you'll see that it's not all bad. At least the gore and violence are well done, and the premise (some students try to make a movie, when in the process their girlfriend is abducted by what turns out to be a psychopathic mass murderer) starts out as fairly original.

Biggest problem is (apart from the story), that the pace at several times sags, due to too many too long scenes and way too much talking, especially by the two detectives, who curiously enough behave, in spite of all their expressed urgency, as tired sleepwalkers, forever pondering and puzzling and deliberating. Another problem are the scenes with the villain, we endlessly see the main characters tied up in their chairs, and the villain walking in and out on them without ever saying a word. This way he never becomes a real person with understandable motives. In fact, apart from the start and the end of the movie, it's all rather uneventful and on the brink of tedious.

The whole thing impresses as a well meant try by film academy students, which probably has been the deliberate aim of the director, when we see the very last scene with the (at least to me!) surprising twist. Even so, the result is as you might expect of such a try: sympathetic but hardly adequate.