Santa Maria College in Bakersfield, California is haunted and "ground zero" is classroom 6. We discover that they taught "Witchcraft and Ancient Symbols" and that is background we get as to the cause of of two disappearances. News reporter Annie Monroe (Valentina Kolaric) assembles a team to spend the night which includes the world's worst news camera man who insists on filming everything at a 10-15 degree angle and he frequently cuts off heads. Special effects include the closing door, power loses, film shake, messed up lip stick, noise, screams, and oooooh the tennis ball. Bad acting too, but to be fair, the script gave them no chance.

Worth a hall pass.

Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity.

Setting a found-footage horror film in a creepy school overnight is an idea with promise. There's something about the school arena, buzzing with life and mischief during the day, being unimaginably eerie during the night. The actors employed here are refreshingly dynamic without seeming stagey and have a naturalistic way about them. Unfortunately the seemingly improvised nature of their scenes often results in them standing around talking over each other, with little to distinguish them and little to distinguish their voices. That none of them seem to be saying much of any importance isn't terribly reassuring.

When all cell phones suddenly run out of power at the same time their watches stop, it becomes clear we are on familiar genre territory here. The camera spluttering and the image distorting allows you to know that something frightening is about to happen, just as it has in other - frankly, better - films of this nature; but 'something frightening' doesn't happen for a very long time. Just more chatting and discussing with no great onset of fear - and little (other than an omnipresent tennis ball) to get worked up about.

With a group dynamic, conflict can be an important and successful way of displaying tension. Such moments here arrive out of nowhere and are then forgotten, meaning anything built up by this dissipates almost immediately.

The finale, when loud noises and disorientation becomes all-encompassing, is effective. And yet, it isn't terribly well done and 'Classroom 6' emerges more as a series of found-footage box-ticking than anything else. It genuinely saddens me to say all that because there's a lot of love and enthusiasm that seems to have gone into director/writer Jonas Odenheimer's project. The assorted actors give it their all, without ever the characters becoming too arrogant and dis-likeable. The end result is just not very satisfying.

I must confess to initially being quite fond of found footage movies, and the odd gem occasionally still pops up. Unfortunately this isn't one of them and joins growing list of misfires in the genre. The premise is quite interesting, but the execution fails to deliver. Even at a relatively short 76 minutes, it seemed too long. When the back story is outlined at the beginning of the movie I really was expecting something above average. However there was very little in the rest of the film that capitalised, or even referred to, this back story. There is basically just a lot of running around screaming and extremely annoying shaky, out of focus hand held shots. Some mostly unexplained arguments and confrontation between the main characters, but very little in the way of actual action. The ending is predictable, and has been done so much better in other movies. There really is nothing new to see here. Next.