This is quite honestly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I've seen Manos: The Hands of Fate. I've seen Troll 2. I've seen The Room. They all have their own redeeming qualities. In particular, those three movies have a plot that actually makes sense. This movie? No.
The premise starts off promising - like the description says, they're a ghost hunting team but one of their members is always playing pranks. SyFy, for some reason, has decided they want to license their ghost hunting web show to turn into a REAL tv show, despite in real life SyFy canceling their actual ghost hunting tv shows.
One of their members has secured access to investigate an infamous house in the area which was the site of 14 "unexplained" murders throughout the centuries. They send the prankster member to set up the equipment, entirely by himself even though it's a big house and there's like 8 people in the group. There's a weird scene where he goes to get a permit to film inside the house but the permit isn't ready yet. (The crew goes to get the permit later on, and it's ready. The guy at the office says the house is creepy. They already knew the house was creepy, this guy never gets brought up again, and it doesn't even matter to the story that they had a permit anyway). When he goes to the house, all the doors but one are locked, and he keeps getting harassed by a kickball. The only good scene in the entire movie is him just launching the kickball out of a window after it mysteriously rolled over to him a second time. Everything after this point is terrible.
I can't understand why people would defend this with "oh it's an indie movie" "oh it's a B movie." Just because it's low budget doesn't mean that the story can get away with making literally no sense. See, the house is apparently NOT haunted by ghosts even though several things that happen can't possibly have been done by humans, but rather there's a Satanic cult who are trying to sacrifice specific people because if they sacrifice enough people then God will allow Lucifer to return to heaven. Because that makes sense. How did the cult know there were enough people in the house at the time for their sacrifices? How do THEY know what the count is? The one character says he knows exactly how many people have been killed with Hebraic numbers on their arms despite most of the murders happening before the time of camera evidence because he... hacked NASA once. I guess back in the 5th century the cultists just traveled in a group and kept tally marks so they'd know for sure how many sacrifices they'd done??? Doesn't make sense.
It's not *unusual* for a horror movie to be full of characters that you're actively rooting for them to be killed, but yikeroni this was especially bad. And the whole "oh is this a prank or is this really happening?" part of the premise? A complete lie. They pretend to murder one person in the group to celebrate this guy's birthday and the pranks never come up again, and that was like 25 minutes in.
The movie's internal logic makes no sense. Okay so they can't open any of the doors or smash windows open because... ghosts, I guess. And I guess ghosts are blocking the one guy's phone signal. Nobody ever checks their own phones after that. But despite the implication that the family fled the house 20 years ago, they still have a really strong wifi signal to their laptops inside the house, and nobody thinks to try using their internet-powered laptop to call the cops even after someone gets murdered. Also, the family fleeing? Supposedly they were so freaked out by the house they left without taking anything that would remind them of the house, and that's why "all their stuff" is still there, and by "all their stuff" they mean 3 blouses, some towels, and some knickknacks. The bedroom vanity doesn't even have a chair or anything you'd expect to see on a vanity - like makeup or perfume, which would make more sense to leave behind in a hurry than your perfect clean bathroom towels that don't look like they were ever used that are hanging up in the closet for some reason. I get they probably didn't have a budget, but they couldn't have gotten the crew/cast to bring some of their own belongings onto set to make the house actually look like a family had left in a hurry abandoning all their belongings, rather than it looking like everyone moved out already but the new buyers get the old furniture?
There's a handful of jump scares which are extremely weak. The acting isn't great, the editing stinks, the directing is not great. I saw an extremely indie movie a couple days before I watched this, and that had like no budget, 10 people worked on it, half the cast was teenagers, and it was much better acted and edited, the plot made more sense, it was scarier (and had zero digital effects in it), and the internal logic made sense (the kids also have no cell signal, but they're inside a large office building and don't have laptops that somehow have perfect internet access).
There's also tons of goofs in this movie - the one character shows her laptop screen but there's very obviously nothing on it when she does it, and the only thing I found super entertaining was that the upstairs rooms seemed to be in an entirely different timezone from the downstairs. It would be pitch dark outside the kitchen windows, they go upstairs and it's broad daylight. Then later it's clearly after sunset in the upstairs bedrooms and fully daylight outside the first floor. If the rest of the movie wasn't awful I would just giggle at those goofs and move on, but as it is they're just icing on top of a poop cake.
Also the ending doesn't make much sense. It's in a doctor's office that looks more like it's inside of someone's house than some *adult films* look. The female character had to go to the doctor for a busted lip and he just walks in and he's like "Did you know you're pregnant?" Like why on earth would he even know that if she just went in to get stitches?? And it's such a huge HIPAA violation to just say that in front of someone who isn't the patient (the guy who was there with her).
Oh also, SUPER gross that the two characters are like "Would you still want to bring a baby into this terrible world if I was able to conceive?" and then they're about to have sex right after two of their friends were brutally murdered.
Just, terrible. The opening/closing song fun to listen to, and at least the people who made this know how to operate a camera correctly. It's just, man, every other bad movie I've ever seen, at least the plot made some sense. This? No.
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