Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I can't understand at all the bashing of this highly effective and suspenseful roller coaster film! Was the patriarch of all found-footage horrors, The Blair Witch Project, filled with gory or other scary elements other than the situation itself, modest scares but so well put in place that made your skin crawl? Honestly this movie kept me on the verge from scene one all over to the finale, which was not what I expected but sinister in deed. By now, this specific sub-genre can hardly bring something totally original and the best the directors can achieve in continuing to make movies in found footage style is to keep you in suspense by skillfully adding small but effective, less gory scares...keep in mind that what one doesn't see is the perfect reason to keep one's interest at pin point. Seeing stuff you already saw and that gave you a full ride of scares is worth seeing again, differently portioned and dozed by a masterful director. I loved this little underrated gem and I believe it should receive more credit from found footage-horror fans. True followers of The Blair Witch Project will clearly enjoy this helluva ride from start to finish and, folks, sometimes less IS more! My unapologetic rating is 9/10.

What on earth was the writer thinking? This film really sucks, a minuscule plot. the only saving grace was the acting and also the soundtrack with credit going to the actor who played the clown. This film Should get a Golden Turkey if they still exist. I had heard good things about this and watched the trailer on you tube but boy was I disappointed. I just didn't get it at all and I was left after 80 minutes going WTF have I just wasted my time on. I really wanted to enjoy this but unfortunately it just left me with a very sour taste in my mouth. Avoid at all costs and I hope to god that there isn't a part two of this EVER.

After 8 years of either being unwilling or unable to make The Strangers II (even after massive prodding from fans), Bryan Bertino has emerged with what has to be the oddest entry to date in the Found Footage genre. Excuse all the comparisons to The Strangers in this review --- but the two films are extremely similar in story.When The Strangers was released, I saw it on opening day and it had a huge build-up from a very disturbing trailer. Although it had a lot going for it in the scares department, helped immensely by solid performances from Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, I was ultimately disappointed by it. I savaged it in my review on IMDb as being too thin and derivative and that might not have been entirely fair. It did have its virtuoso moments and a prevailing creepy mood. I just felt it didn't add enough original layers of fear beyond being chased by a bogeyman.Most traditional horror films have some kind of Act One Setup. Though The Strangers attempted this, I never thought it succeeded. I never thought enough time was spent on the characters of Kristin and Jim (Tyler and Speedman) to engage us fully in their terror and fight for survival. Perhaps Tyler and Speedman were just too convincing and thus harder to disengage from when Bertino gave them little to work with, plot-wise.With a storyline this thin (little background on protagonists, no motivation for antagonist, almost immediate intro of A Threat), an almost constant barrage of non-stop terror is required and that is difficult to sustain for a full-length feature. Again, the Strangers tried but, after the one hour mark, largely lost steam. Only two other movies that I've seen have really been able to do this effectively throughout: namely Them (2006) and High Tension (2003). And the fact that The Strangers is almost a direct crib of Them didn't impress me (with the slight change being the age of the antagonists).The good news about Mockingbird is that, even though it doesn't develop it's characters much more than The Strangers, they aren't characters that are critical to develop. Bertino also segments the narrative with frequent title cards that encourage even more disengagement. At times, Bertino seems to be egging us on to --- yes --- "mock" his triumvirate of gullible idiots in Mockingbird. More emotional distance would seem to mean more traditional scares are in store, right? Well, not really.There is The Family, The Woman, and The Clown, all of them kind of pathetic characters in some regard, who basically spend the entire film being terrorized and mentally tortured by an unseen adversary with a lot of time or money on their hands. The premise is simple: accept a free video camera and keep filming, or die. I found that idea a little more interesting, cryptic, and diabolical than the standard stalk-and-slash. I equate real terror more to dread and fear (at the movies anyway) and Bertino nicely controls this with Mockingbird, and he gets fairly inventive with the torments too. The scariest part of The Strangers, to me, was the first forty minutes when the antagonists were virtually off screen. Mockingbird is more like an extended version of that segment, with more palpable tension because the terror is simply spread out in one unrelenting, though low frequency, undercurrent. Unfortunately, it's offset by the fact that it's fairly easy to see where things are going from about the movie's halfway-point. The reason why these victims were chosen becomes a bit too obvious.The ending, too, is vastly anti-climactic and yet another steal from Them. Bertino is well capable of creating ominous moods and surprising us with occasional jump-in-your-seat scares. But with Mockingbird, one senses he needs some fresh inspiration. I have a hard time believing his core cult audience for The Strangers (the people who spend hours writing potential sequel stories and posting them on the message boards here) are going to be able to sit still long enough for Mockingbird to really get rolling and then be happy with the results. If you want in-your-face scares, Mockingbird isn't that kind of fowl at all --- but it's still kind of foul in its own gleefully sadistic way.

4/10. Three set of people: a woman, a couple, and a man who lives with his mother are mysteriously given large bulky VHS cameras (it takes place in 1995) on their doorsteps and told to "keep filming." In addition the man is told has been entered in a contest where he can win 10 thousand dollars.This starts out as an interesting premise but doesn't really go anywhere. The woman and the couple stay in their homes as they begin to be terrorized by bangings at the door and sinister telephone calls but are given very little to do.The man is given orders to leave his home and perform a variety of tasks in full clown suit and makeup and this is a little more interesting, but it doesn't really carry the movie.Eventually it all culminates in a twist that I didn't see coming, but thought was full of plot holes and didn't make much sense.I wouldn't necessarily say avoid this one but don't look for anything groundbreaking or very cohesive and entertaining.