One of the things I like about the found footage genre is evidenced at the beginning of 'The Devil Within', when the camera remains locked onto a character as he conveys all kinds of emotion to the viewer without the help of moody lightning, artistic cutting or indeed anything to enhance the performance. The actor therefore has no choice but to play everything completely naturally because the unforgiving nature of an unedited shot would betray any lapse.

That's the first impression I got from the opening moments as Professor Popescu (Adrian Carlugeo) warns us how terrible are the events we are about to see. He is wrong, unfortunately, for what follows is three actors with very little chemistry traipsing around the tremendous snowy Hoia Bacui Forest in a shockingly dull, blatant recreation of events in 'The Blair Witch Project (1999)' – inferior in every way, sadly. They get lost, argue and nothing happens. The discovery of the dead body of their erstwhile companion, the ferociously bearded Mr Dogaru (Bill Hutchins) fails to invest any scares into these uneventful wanderings: 'What happened to him?' 'He's f****** dead, that's what happened to him,' – all lines delivered with all the conviction of characters not remotely bothered.

Rumour has it that for 'Blair Witch', the director left his cast alone for most of the time in the unforgiving location, only to creep up on them at night and scare them – this produced a very real, wearied, raw set of performances. Here, the terrain is even less hospitable, but there are no scares, no tension whatsoever – any energy is drained from the young cast producing beleaguered dramatics in a disappointingly uneventful picture.

This has to be one of the worst films that I have ever seen.

If you like watching a few, very uninteresting, people walk through snow-covered woodlands for most of the movie, then you're in for a real treat. I can honestly say that I don't think I've ever seen a film with such a weak cast and such a weak plot. It's like a really bad Blair Witch in that it's set in a haunted forest, but it has no believable scares or any interesting characters. The characters and plot are so lame, it's like a few people, without an ounce of imagination between them (and I'm not exaggerating here), got together and shot an extremely low budget amateur home movie.

I'm the first person to rant about people giving films bad reviews that really don't deserve them, especially when they give half decent films only 1 star. You know the type of trolls I'm referring to, but in this case I genuinely believe that the 4.2 rating is far too generous.

An amazing setting only can't do much for a found footage horror movie with low budget, uncharismatic actors with foreign accents and an overdone storyline. That being said, the movie misses the point of being scary and it looks like it doesn't even try. The scenes happen as they come, without momentum or a real terror content and it comes close to being just necessary chapters to respect the genre it is supposed to be, all in all weakly acted and directed. The actors are the main issue here. They just don't go together and that's obvious from the beginning. It's like none of them want to be there. I wasn't expecting much from it, but can't say I'm not somewhat disappointed about the lack of one or two well-crafted scares which would've saved something out of this lame duck movie. A missed shot.