I was nice and overlooking the whole "struggling Youtubers" angle to it, combined with the protagonists being a pack of obnoxious idiots, and rather well taken in by what amounts to, most of the time, a rather straight-forward little "found footage" horror movie made on an extremely low budget.
The film claims the footage was all found in 2010, which puts it a bit at odds with the whole concept of "YouTubers" since that wasn't as much of a thing. It's not entirely big of an issue or even in any way inaccurate, but the way in which these guys seem to be planning stuff out feels slightly anachronistic.
It was tense and rather scary in certain places, but it completely self-sabotages by giving itself away with the random on-screen static and distortion any time the "Thin Man" or anything related to it shows up literally anywhere on screen, even as a tiny blip of a shadow in some corner of the screen.
Moments build up slowly to some bits of scares and jumpscares, then are immediately telegraphed with the annoying static, basically warning you of an impending jumpscare before the actual jumpscare . It does this nonstop and it essentially kills the film. What ever you can say for what went right with the film (because a whole lot of it is ordinary, predictable, and cliché), the atmosphere it had maintained ends up ruined by the constant static telegraphing every spooky moment.
Aside from that, there's one thing that really irritated me to no end. I've watched a whole bunch of horror movies, bad horror movies, low budget horror movies, bad low budget horror movies, including some with utterly atrocious acting. Something about bad acting is almost like an art form, with some people trying so hard and failing so miserably, and others just managing to perfect an awful tone without much effort.
The guy here playing Alasdair was a special kind of awful, initially sounding like someone they literally pulled off the street and told to read from cue cards on the spot. This performance later seems to degrade, as though he had just consumed a tremendous amount of alcohol and/or marijuana right as they first filmed him, and it gradually started to kick in as the scene progressed, turning into a meandering, mumbling performance that is at the very least fascinating to listen to.
