Grave Encounters’s callous disregard for its own protagonists, whom it castigates for insufficient fear of the unknown, causes the film to flounder in its attempts to engender any rooting interest in their ultimate survival. It’s a transparently “ironic” setup, one that first dully panders to its audience’s general doubts about the otherworldly, and yet eventually allows them to revel, with judgmental detachment, in the dim-witted characters’ ghoulish suffering (“Oh, what fools these disbelievers were!”). In this regard, the Vicious Brothers’ debut recalls The Last Exorcism, with which it shares a fondness for having smug phonies rush smack-dab into actual horrors as a means of punishing them for their arrogant skepticism. Led by Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), the group can barely refrain from mocking the idea of the supernatural during daytime filming, joking around and goofing off as they tour the enormous building’s various scary spots with a janitor (Bob Rathie), as well as while bribing a gardener to lie about ghostly encounters on camera. Directed by the Vicious Brothers, this latest knockoff purports to be found footage shot by the cast and crew of a Ghost Hunters-style reality-TV program as they searched for spooks in a supposedly haunted Maryland psychiatric hospital. Twelve long years after The Blair Witch Project pushed the first-person-POV subgenre to horror’s forefront, and four years after expertly refined the formula, Grave Encounters can’t even pretend to be anything other than hopelessly derivative.

Dreamy days in west tokyo stuck in loop