LAIR OF THE BEAST is a particularly mundane example of the indie found footage horror movie, with a quartet of friends hunting for the legendary Chupacabra in their local wood. There's an age spent wandering around with a bunch of ultra-annoying characters, but little in the way of actual horror content. Expect cliches rather than scares.

An unarmed group of young adults travel to North Pineland Territory at Lake Emerald, California with hopes of actually finding the meat eating Chupacabra. The group is lead by amateur cypto-zoologist and part time psychic Amber (Sarah Nicklin). They do the filming the car trip to build character and we instantly hope Morgan (Alex Hayek) our cynical voice of reason, is the first to die. Like a good slasher film, they stop for gas and meet the crazy local. They had some issues along the way but eventually make it to the woods where they meet up with people to add to the victim total.

This is a found footage tape. The beginning blurb claims it was made in 2013 and released by the FBI under the FOIA. The movie includes The "what is that" cam, ground cam, person dragged on the ground cam (final scene in 50% of these films),night screaming cam, and jerk cam, And for our viewing pleasure we have a boob cam and sex cam...cowgirl and doggy.

There is a guy in the background in an SCBA in a few of the scenes. Why? I still don't know. Very rare and quick glimpses of the creature.

Guide: F-word, sex, nudity ( Sarah Nicklin, Megan Hensley) The three ladies in the film also appeared together in "Alice D."

This is one of those badly scripted student films that have a cast of really terrible actors who are so obnoxious that you wish the chupacabra would have come out in the first 15 minutes and killed them all to save us the idiocy that follows. I think I would have enjoyed it better to see these snotty brats torn to pieces by a goat monster or whatever it was supposed to be, but that was not to be...

Part way in, we were laughing and joking about how this should have be an ad for the discovertheforest.org campaign - "why morons who know nothing about nature should not go traipsing around in the woods in the middle of the night. "

There are some really funny scenes though. Near the beginning, one guy freaked out when a tree branch fell near him. The nutty scenes with the "psychic" girl were pretty funny too.

If you stay with this atrocity long enough you can laugh at this "psychic" girl (who says she's a part-time witch as well) goes into convulsions near a tree. And later she gets possessed presumably by the chupacabra after performing a ritual out of some book that was supposedly made from the skin of the chupacabra. Are you still following? Now tell me honestly, is that the dumbest thing you ever heard?

And if she really was a real psychic, she would have never gone on this dumb camping trip with these goofballs in the first place. Half the time, she's such a bad actress she looks likes she's laughing instead of screaming. I guess the script was too funny to take seriously.

As usual, none of this makes any sense.

There's an old rule for horror movies. It's only scary if you care about what happens to the characters. This wasn't even slightly scary. I found myself rooting for the monster even though we really never saw it.

I always wonder how these movies get the funding. And how in the world did it get a 6.3 rating when every review I've read gave it a 3 or less? I guess I know, but it's sad you can't trust the ratings on this site.