It's a bit sad, almost pathetic even, how this film desperately tries to attract wider audiences by referring to "The Strangers" all the time. "The Strangers" unexpectedly became one of the commercially successful horror hits of 2008. Okay, writer/director Bryan Bertino previously made "The Strangers". So what? It wasn't exactly a masterpiece of horror cinema, now was it? "The Strangers" was entertaining at best and, moreover, Bertino shamelessly recycles the very few good aspects of his previous film here. Once again, he ventures into the domain of home invaders, invisible but omnipresent assailants and shock-endings that honestly aren't that shocking. The only aspect that is added in "Mockingbird" is the dreadful found-footage filming style. Found-footage, really? I thought that annoying horror trend had died by 2014 already? The plot - or a lack thereof - mixes the lives of several people who supposedly won a video camera in a supermarket contest and receive instructions to keep filming whatever they do. There's a couple with young children, a single woman and a loser in his late twenties who still lives with his mother. The couple and the single woman soon notice they are unable to turn off their cameras and find themselves harassed by sinister figures moving around their houses. The slacker - Leonard - receives instructions to dress up like a clown and complete increasingly humiliating assignments, and he does them, too! You quickly see where all this is going: these poor suckers are driven to madness before being brought together in a place where things will end dramatically for them, as they always do for innocent people. Only at the end it's revealed who's responsible for sending the cameras etc. and why, but it's the same old, dire and irritating revelation as always. The climax is thus very short, predictable and dull, but everything leading up to the climax is even worse! "Mockingbird" is an indescribably boring film, full of uninteresting footage and anecdotes of uninteresting people. Bryan Bertino fails miserably at generating any suspense or atmosphere whatsoever, the shaky camera handling still makes me nauseous and the nice classical music deserves to be used in a more qualitative film. This is honestly one of the worst excuses for a horror film that I've seen in years, avoid at all costs!
Review of Mockingbird
