About as scary as Michael Palin's 80 Days Around The World

Rating: 1/10 (15 November 1999)

I don't know if the 'directors' didn't have enough good footage to make a decent film or were simply inept at editing it together, but this film is awful. Don't believe the hype, you will be duped into parting with hard-earned cash for an hour and a quarter of total rubbish. If you're expecting to be scared, you will be sorely disappointed. This is not supposed to be a conventional horror film, but even giving it miles of leeway it fails miserably. The only enjoyable thing is the comedy factor of watching the two guys flip out at the girl for being an annoying whiner. The first hour is pure comedy in a kind of docu-drama version of 'Slacker' (a great film by the way). The girl is the annoying, enthusiastic and naive filmaker, Michael is a serious, straight kind of guy and Josh is somewhere inbetween, leaning more towards a kind of surfer-dude than anything else. The interaction between the three is enjoyable, especially when things start to go wrong, but you find yourself wishing they'd either get on with the horror or just give it a miss entirely, as the 'horror' sections in the first hour come simply as annoying interruptions of the comedy. The last 15 minutes do create some kind of tension and atmosphere, but even that is not used very effectively. In the docu-film TV series 'Michael Palin's 80 Days...', at least we had the scare of Michael occasionally missing a train and being stuck in a train station, but this docu-horror doesn't even scare that much.