Starts off scary but ends as a joke

Rating: 4/10 (30 December 2009)

This film started well. It successfully instilled a growing sense of dread in me and I had high hopes for the movie.
However, the film made a fatal mistake when it showed the video of the exorcist. This was so badly done and such an obvious rip-off of the Linda Blair film that any suspension of disbelief that had been built up was jarringly ripped away and suddenly the viewer is extremely conscious that they are just watching a movie, and a cheaply made one at that. Had the film not been made in a documentary style they may have got away with this but the juxtaposition of the supposedly ultra-realistic style and this ludicrous and badly realised fantastical sequence just didn't work.
After that nothing that happened in the film was scary, rather I found myself laughing as I thought of members of the film crew stomping around making the 'noises off'.
I also think they made a mistake making the antagonist a demon and not a ghost. For me this was too fantastic and placed the film in the realm of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and not in a good way) which again didn't sit with the film's documentary style.
One final criticism is the way the film split up the 'scary' night time footage with the everyday stuff. It basically warned the viewer each time that something scary was about to happen. Truly scary films are those where the shocks are unexpected. I think the film would have been better if some of the activity had started to bleed into the daytime footage, maybe just some odd goings on in the background.
Instead of watching this I'd recommend people watch Blair Witch and Incident at Lake County for truly scary and well done examples of this genre.