A very brief scene with an alligator is the highlight. (He doesn't threaten or attack anyone.)
I've got a bone to pick with these damn silly insane asylum ghost flicks. If a team goes into an abandoned building to PROVE the existence of ghosts, then surely they must BELIEVE they will find ghosts there, and if they believe that then shouldn't they go in PREPARED for a potential attack? Instead, we've got yet another unarmed ghost-hunting team that believes in dangerous creatures. They are believers but don't consider bringing anything for self-defense. Not sure whether conventional weaponry would/should be effective against the Boo Brigade, but at least it shows preparedness. And a small measure of intelligence.
But, yeah, sure... This common affliction is the last of this cheapo film's problems.
Let's start with the comic-book sequences. That's right, the movie fills in the "budgetary gaps" with very lame cartoon stills, including an even lamer narrator providing the voices. I can draw better with my feet! With my feet tied. With my feet tied in barbed wire. With my feet tied in barbed-wire while being lowered into a den of vipers. With my feet tied in barbed-wire while being lowered into a den of vipers while intent on making the drawing as bad as possible.
It takes more than a half-hour, almost half the movie, for the action to start. (We won't count the cartoon stills as action, as I believe you'll agree.) The cannibal shows up, attacks his first victim... And the team decides that his disappearance is nothing to get excited about. Instead, the grrl-power girl comes across some blood... yet STILL refuses to make the connection between this blood and the missing black guy. Instead, she is almost relieved to come across a scurrying rat, which leads her to the unfathomably dumb conclusion that the blood must be the rat's and that this, somehow, proves that the missing guy isn't in danger.
Meanwhile, the team leader faces the cannibal and scurries away like a little frightened mouse. Does he alert the others? Nope. At the same time, the girl and the indoor-beanie-wearing hipster nerd discover a small piece of their missing team-member. She immediately identifies it as part of the black guy! How the hell does she know this?! For one thing it's very dark, and besides which, she was not expecting him to be dead - much less torn apart - so where the hell does she draw this bizarre yet correct conclusion from? She should play the lottery more often.
She and the hipster then have a very lengthy and awfully silly conversation about whether their leader is staging an elaborate prank! Totally illogical: if these millennial bozos came to prove that ghosts exist, WHY are they in such denial about the possibility they're being "punked" by a ghost! Completely cardboard characters with zero credibility. This scene serves no purpose other than to tell us that this "investigative team" are just a bunch of paranoid, cowardly morons. It also serves to buy the cannibal time to catch and kill his food more easily. As if he needed any additional time to buy - or help from the inept script-writer. Even sillier, the girl and the hipster cling on to the conspiracy prank theory even after they've been told that a suspicious-looking person is wondering around... So they don't believe in serial-killers either?
The girl is somehow smart enough to immediately identify the body part as being that of their friend - and yet later on she clings on to the "prop theory" even after faced with mounting evidence that something serious is going on. The whole prop shtick is truly edwoodesque, it's like a running gag.
This Z-movie is alternately boring, predictable, dumb, and unintentionally funny, with dialog that spans the range from utterly dull to MST3K hilarious. A visually bland, non-atmospheric govno in which the acting starts off as wooden but gradually morphs into snicker-worthy overacting. I guess the cast needed time to "warm up".
"I've seen this movie before and I know how it ends", says the hipster during a particularly silly "prop conspiracy" dialog. The fascinating part is, I doubt this was even intended to be ironically humorous! Not that it would be remotely funny or clever even if it were...
"No. If he were the Mole Man, don't you believe he would have killed me right on the spot?" Well, duh, don't you watch ghost films? Cannibal apparitions often like to take their time, to play with their food before killing it. Kind of like some cats.
"This isn't a prank anymore!" says the girl. Well, it never was a prank to begin with, so why the "anymore"?... Damn, these characters are beyond idiotic, and the script is ultra-pedestrian.
"Props: The Movie". A more suitable title. I've never come across a horror film that uses the word "prop" so often. Half the plot seems to revolve around imaginary props. For propists - i.e. fans of prop conspiracies - a great cinematic classic, but the rest of you might want to spend 90 minutes staring into a wall instead.
But, if nothing, at least this silly turkey teaches us a valuable lesson: never send a hipster and a Goth chick to search for ghosts. They will eventually start getting lost in the thickets of proparanoia.
Baby Boomers and Xers never had much luck exploring abandoned asylums - so why send millennials to do this job?!
The movie gets a 3/10 instead of a zero, just because it made me laugh out loud a few times. Funniest scene: Goth chick trying to talk beanie boy into finding the files before running away: comedy gold. By the time the movie is over you wish they'd made a comedy with these two doing a sort of millennial take on Beavis & Butthead. MST3K need to reform and do this one.
Stick around to see the killer! He looks like The Cars singer wearing WWI pilot glasses. And he smirks like Sid Vicious. And he takes away the hipster's beanie by scalping him! Team 13 not only proves that ghosts exist, but even more importantly they offer irrefutable evidence that scalping is the only way to separate a hipster from his beanie...
Would the movie be so kind as to explain why the killer doesn't slay his years-long tormentor at the asylum - the good lady doctor? No, I guess not... He is more interested in slaying random people who never harmed him.
Oh yeah, and the film opens with a major spoiler. Really smart film-making that we've got here... I love how modern horror film-makers are so insecure that they open their films with a key scene that comes much later. As if to say: "Please, kids, don't quit on us yet, there will be awesome action and gore galore later on! Bear with us, pretty please with cheery on top, sugar and spice, everything nice!" Movies should never open with their own trailers.
A nerdy Z-movie director saying this into the camera would actually be scarier than this cheesy comedy.
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