The Lost Episode is marketed as another Found Footage film, one of several (Episode 50, Paranormal Incident, Grave Encounters) to follow a group of documentary ghost hunters around a disused asylum. And indeed, that is the story, but the film itself is shot with a conventional narrative structure. When the distributors are actively trying to fool audiences into thinking that they will get another example of a genre that is less than adored, you know you’re in trouble. And sure enough, The Lost Episode takes little time to establish itself as breathtakingly, soul-crushingly awful. That the film is directed, co-produced and starred in by Michael Rooker is very, very depressing.

The film opens with a bunch of astonishingly annoying teens (annoying both as characters and incredibly inept actors) who visit the derelict Pennhusrt asylum, where one of them regales the others with the story of a TV crew who ‘disappeared’ there. How he knows the intimate details of what happened is never explained, but thankfully, the bulk of the film is taken up with this story. Not that it’s any good, or that the actors are any better (seriously: if anyone in this film apart from Rooker ever works again, that’ll be the scariest part of the movie), but at least the characters are slightly less annoying.

The film then follows the usual trajectory of ghost encounters as the characters split up. One character meets a topless ghost and, naturally, has sex with her – because what else would you do in those circumstances? It’s clearly supernatural sex, because she doesn’t need to take her knickers off. But eventually, the crew start to fall victim to the imaginatively named Doctor Death (Rooker), who kills them in gory medical experiments. It turns out (and if you are foolish enough to think about actually watching this, be warned: slight spoiler ahead) that he is a former patient and very much alive, and that the ghosts have been trying to help the hapless crew – which makes absolutely no sense given what has come before.

In fact, this feels like a film thrown together on the spot. The story fails to hang together, the characters are all one dimensional and forgettable, and the film itself wanders somewhere between torture horror and ghost story. The acting is, as I suggested earlier, breathtakingly bad. Birdemic bad. But not Birdemic entertaining, sadly. The production values resemble a trailer park zombie film and even at 77 minutes, the film is more heavily padded than a rubber room. There is one moment of entertaining ineptness, when two female ‘characters’ are assailed by invisible ghosts (fans of 1970s era Dr Who might appreciate the special effects and performances in this scene), but the rest of the film is too dull to even have a ‘so bad it’s good’ appeal. Sadly, The Lost Episode is simply so bad, it’s unwatchable.

DAVID FLINT

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