INVESTIGATION 13

CONTAINS SPOILERS, AGAIN

More camcorder-wielding idiots get chased around an abandoned location by some kind of evil horror idea, variously identified as a ghost, an escaped mental patient, or a creepy homeless guy, and then it stops. Mercifully it isn't found footage, despite the basic setup of a quartet of students seeking definite proof of the afterlife by wandering around the supposedly haunted asylum in the middle of the night with walkie-talkies and cameras, but the film not being found footage is hardly any kind of recommendation.

After their twelfth investigation into paranormal activity failed to produce the required results, the team are now under pressure to come up with something - anything - in the old mental hospital where a particularly violent patient allegedly escaped after twenty-five years of increasing electro-shock treatment, but might now be haunting the place. Quite why they've settled on the asylum as a suitable site to research the possibility of ghosts when there are two other earthly possibilities to entirely invalidate their findings is left unexplored. In addition, the film completely ignores his age: if he was being brainzapped back in 1951 he'd be in his eighties at least by now and thus unlikely to be lurking around in the darkness eating rats and offing stray teenagers. Oblivious, the gang set up Investigation 13, posting cameras all over and wearing Google Glass spectacles....

There's no atmosphere to be had here: even the location, which would normally do a lot of the heavy lifting in this sort of thing, can't be bothered to be even slightly creepy. Early on, the script infodumps mightily upon us via guest star Meg Foster, but much of the backstory is actually told via rudimentary animation sequences detailing poor Leonard Craven's miserable upbringing and his sentencing to a psychiatric institution after killing his abusive and heroin-addicted parents. The rest of it is just the usual routine of bickering halfwits stumbling around in the dark and screaming. Some might consider this a good time; I'm not one of them.

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