Found footage film borrows a bit from The Blair Witch Project and just about every other in the woods film. Standard characters with requisite annoyance and singular focus on "the project" without regard to common sense. The creatures have a certain creepiness to them, but that doesn't make a film. Townsfolk bring a minor element that adds something different to the mix, but it isn't enough to save the film. Okay enough if you like this type of film, but it's nothing new or great.

Over a period of 40 years young women have been found mysterious killed at 10 year intervals of the winter solstice. Raymond Banks has been convicted for the last two. A crew of four people decide to do a film on the incident on what happens to be the 10 year anniversary. They hire a professional camera man because apparently they couldn't cut off heads and jerk the camera around on their own. It was a fairly nice size camera, that I had to think, "Is someone really running holding this thing while being chased by a vampire?"

The production has your typical bad found footage films plus needless build up garbage that doesn't tie into anything. Bill Oberst Jr. did a nice job of Raymond Banks for what little time he was on the screen. The rest of the cast read and screamed their formulaic lines as we await the tail end of the feature to see the creature...which to their credit wasn't the last three frames.

A rental for fans of found footage.

Parental Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

The vampires look pretty decent. The premise was OK. The setting was fine. The actors were quite adequate for a found footage flick. Yet it was not a pleasurable experience.

Why?

The main problem with the film is that it is very unoriginal and lazy. It is a pale copy of Blair Witch Project with vampires instead of the witch.

Also, the film wastes time on characters that are totally unimportant. The part of the film where they get seriously involved with the vampires comes after a totally unnecessary and dull exposition. One gets the impression of being cheated. You have people in the middle of the woods being stalked by winged vampires that hang from trees and look pretty menacing, yet you only get to see them doing things at the very end, while the build-up to it is poorly done, unlike the build-up in Blair Witch Project, which was very effective and nerve-wrecking. The final proof of the erratic and confused approach to this film by the filmmakers comes in the final scene, where the film gets into Rosemary's Baby territory. Like so many bad found footage films, this film is lazy and throws in whatever cliché it can think of, while the end result is a film that has no consistency or sense of knowing what it is and what the story is about.

A wasted opportunity.