A 2 is being nice. I'm very surprised that Beverley Mitchell & Haylie Duff are associated with this video (yup, filmed on vid not film). Then I saw they helped produce it. Ouch! C'mon ladies! I wanted to stop watching after 20 minutes but out of a love of Bev & Haylie I continued til the end. The acting is some of the worst I've ever seen. Although Haylie does a good job at being believable the rest of the cast is pretty blah. Sorry to say Bev even wasn't up to par in this and I'm a big fan of hers. It's categorized as horror, I see it as comedy. I see the budget was 1 million. Where'd it go? Certainly not into the making of this movie. With Michael Rooker directing you'd think the movie would be worth a watch. Sorry, Mr. Rooker. Don't quit your day job.

THE LOST EPISODE is another in a long line of no-budget found-footage ghost films set in abandoned asylums, following on from the likes of the GRAVE ENCOUNTERS films and EPISODE 50. This one's the worst yet, despite the presence of cult horror favourite Michael Rooker (HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER) working as both director and guest star.

This film features a muddled narrative set in both past and present, repeatedly swapping between the two time zones. One narrative involves a film crew shooting a documentary in the asylum, the other involves the stereotypical group of teenagers out for a thrill. Lots of lame wandering around and godawful dialogue scenes are interspersed with some extraordinarily lame deaths.

The movie's cast is appalling, with not one actor standing out from the quagmire. Rooker wisely hides his face behind a mask for the most part, but as a director he displays no discernible talent whatsoever; stick to what you're good at, dude, i.e. stay in FRONT of the camera where we want to see you! Needless to say there's nothing else worth mentioning here, because it's an entirely worthless film and comes close to meriting the dreaded 'one star' rating.

Not a found footage movie, but rather a movie based upon what's become one of the more standard found footage movie plots. What am I talking about? Only this...

Pennhurst is about a group of obnoxious teens who go to an abandoned mental hospital to screw around. While there, the most obnoxious of the bunch tells the story of a TV "ghost hunting" crew who visited that selfsame hospital and were brutally murdered. Pretty standard, yes? No! This film doesn't even try to maintain the found footage conceit. Badly chosen music, meant to be scary I suppose, crops up on the soundtrack throughout. And speaking of scary, there ain't none. Maybe two or three scenes, all of them staring the film's director/star Michael Rooker, could be considered at all scary and then only if they were taken out of context with rest of the film.

If Pennhurst has a saving grace, it's that at least the cast looked like they were having fun shooting it. Which is good, because I doubt anyone else will enjoy it as much.