Lake Artifact

 A group of young adult friends (Thomas Brazzle, Catharine Daddario, Anna Shields and Chris Cimperman) plus a mysterious, affable hitchhiker (Dylan Gunn) they meet on the road head out to a remote lake cabin to enjoy a few nights of very mild partying. But the site they've chosen is a paranormal hotspot, as foreshadowed by several locals interviewed on-camera by a mysterious man.

 The strange phenomena pile up without much in the way of rhyme nor reason - I mean, sure, the roads loop and time seems to transcur unevenly for our protagonists, but what's the deal with the mysterious printer that spits out pictures no one seems to remember taking?
  There's a very muddled, barely sensical explanation involving some poorly-sketched multiversal conflux, but Coherence, this ain't - things barely make any sense and they don't amount to much dramatically, either. Even when people are trying to kill each other all over the place. 

 Writer/director Bruce Wemple keeps things rolling with constant developments, and the film looks pretty good for its non-existent production values. But events don't assemble into any sort of compelling picture, and the characters - through no fault of the actors playing them - and the situations they find themselves embroiled in fail to generate the sort of empathy needed for us to get invested in their fates. And so Lake Artifact fails at both of the genres it straddles.

 I try to cut these low-budget efforts a lot of slack, but aside from a fun twist late in the game, there's barely anything going for this one aside from the competence with which it's made.