A horror streaming channel enlists a bunch of randos and a couple of internet personalities to go explore one of the (real-life) "7 freakiest places on the planet", according to CNN: Gonjiam Asylum, an abandoned mental hospital with a murky spooky history that the film, sadly, seems completely uninterested in exploring.
Maybe you have a higher tolerance for influencers; In my case, I couldn't wait for most of these thinly drawn asshats to start getting killed in gruesome ways. Sadly, we get to spend a lot of quality time with them before anyone comes even close to dying - first as the 'captain' (Wi Ha-Joon) lays out the plans for the stream and the crew make their way to their destination, then as they start exploring the hospital while the intrepid leader watches from a tent and edits and adds music to the stream in real time.
And we get to be very close to them, too, thanks to the camera rig with which they're outfitted: one go-pro to see everything they're seeing... and another one pointed straight at their face to catch their every reaction. So when things finally get moving and everyone starts getting chased by the asylum haunts, we get all the screaming via a very close-up (think Iron Man's in-helmet cam). At least that part seems to be faithful to an actual horror streams. Could have done without that.
Beyond being young, pretty and vacuous, there's not a lot going on with the cast. The script barely slows down to give the characters space - and to be honest, when it does, like one guys constant negging of the girl with the weakest personality - it distanced me even more from them.
The asylum itself fares a little bit better. There's no rhyme nor reason to the haunting, no coherence to the spooky shit - just an assemblage of random weird imagery and fairly well-trod scares, but there's a decent sense of buildup, and urban exploration of dark, derelict spaces is never going to fail completely at being creepy. And things do get admirably hectic once the film decides to stop wasting our time and throws everything it can think of at the screen in an attempt to scare the audience.
The spooky business is varied and well staged, with a good combination of jump-scares and more slow-burning atmospheric groundwork. Some good imagery, too, though most of it feels fairly random. Not that all of it works; Spooky changing grafitti will never not be stupid, and one of the film's centerpiece scares - its own take on Evil Dead's possessed deadites - is so stupid-looking it made me laugh every time it appeared.
Visually... it's a found footage film, so don't expect anything on that front. A couple of scenes are captured with extremely wide angle cameras, which at least adds some flair to the fumbling-in-the-dark scenes. Other than that, it (by design) combines the ugliness of found footage films and youtube reaction videos. No blood, no gore, which is kind of admirable in a film of this type (and kind of reinforces my impression that it's at least partly aimed at a teen audience.)
It's a movie that clearly has one mandate - to scare the living shit out its viewers. Personally I thought it was a little too blatant, derivative and incoherent in the way it goes about doing that to be successful, but it definitely gets an A for effort and a passing grade.
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