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I truly don't know what to say except I'm at a loss for words to fully describe my confusion at what critics saw-did we all watch the same thing?-beyond a horrible indulgent gratuitous mess derivative of The Fly, Carrie, The Shining, Requiem for a Dream, tied up in some ass-obsessed gore intense fever dream. I didn't laugh once, so I'm not sure what I'm missing, but I didn't enjoy this-and I love some seriously f**cked up movies. I suffered through it. Feels like an ironically grotesque last grasp at making herself shockingly "relevant." Between this and the news that Lil Jon is dropping a meditation albums, I don't know what's going on anymore. Like I asked of the "audience" at the end of the movie, Im asking myself the same question in hindsight: why are you still sitting there?!

I don't think everything Raimi has done is amazing (outside of the horror genre), and I have no idea just how heavy of a hand he had in this, but for him, this movie feels like a rare show of restraint. I stayed on board the entire time because people have to make a couple of bad decisions for any of these genre movies to happen-if what's going on between point A and B is gripping enough, it doesn't matter. I didn't feel that anyone here was being "particularly stupid" in the world of the movie. You have one severely traumatized person trying to escape from another traumatized but ultimately deranged person. He is a psychopath. Not a quiet evil genius. This is an unpopular opinion, but to me the pacing was solid, unlike other similar stories that drag and hang on "atmosphere." You can't look away from Finn Wittrock at his most intense, whatever he's in, and if a twist is something you don't see coming, about 50 minutes in, it earned a gasp from me. What I do know is that for me, he usually always delivers on on the entertainment scale. At times, he temporarily transports you somewhere gripping enough to make you forget where you are. The ending is where it fell flat for me, like they went with the alternate ending for whatever lazy or pandering reason. Still, those two actors carried an entire movie, minor flaws and all, on their backs. I enjoyed it.

This literally feels like a compilation of (rightfully) deleted scenes from the other two movies. A very, very, very long one.

We know the end goal of this character, and we know the shtick: you never know when the real thing is coming, and the guys deranged. We did not need dozens of other barely tweaked iterations.

I liked the other movies because you really did not know who you were dealing with or what was ultimately going to go down.

Guess what's on the tapes?

Exactly what you'd expect.

If you aren't convinced this is a vanity project, consider this: do you seriously need an entire opening credits song with animation if it's just your 3 names shown 10 different ways with different titles?

I'm willing to say that this works really well if you've never seen the movies.

Then again, if you're subscribed to Shudder, you've probably seen them, and this is streaming exclusively with Shudder. My sense is they wanted this big name for an original and Duplass got to do whatever he wanted.

In summation, Duplass should probably spare us any more of this and directly unpack his deep rooted issues with videographers.