There are good and bad films that have been presented as found-footage. It is a worn-out subgenre but still having an effect at times. The Resort, despite desperately wanting to be part of the subgenre, remains a conventional film where the events are narrated and we can see them in the form of a flashback.

Lex (Bianca Haase) has an obsession with the paranormal and she’s writing a book about it. For her birthday, Lex’s three closest friends, or so they seem to be, decide to take her on a surprise trip to an abandoned resort in Hawaii. The resort is supposedly haunted by what the locals call, or in this case they don’t even like to talk about it, the Half-Faced girl. When they arrive on the island, they’re warned to catch the last boat back to mainland before night comes but, as the terrible friends they come to be, instead of fulfilling Lex’s birthday wishes they waste their time walking around places that look like the natural sets of Lost. When they finally find the resort, they realize the place isn’t as abandoned as they thought it would be and strange things happen along their poor investigation.

With a couple of jump-scares and uninteresting scare tactics, The Resort lands more of an awkward look-around feeling than a desperate need to survive— the characters are so annoying that you can’t even feel bothered to watch if they survive or not. It doesn’t matter if you think you might get attached to the characters, no matter how they act out, because there are no twists and turns during the whole storytelling since we get to know their faiths from the beginning. Similarly, if it had been kept a secret until the end, it would have been difficult to find chemistry with a group of characters so austere even the stiffest puppet would look reactive.

Even when it’s hard enough to make it believable for the characters to be friends, things get dicer when it comes to convincing the audience this film works with a challenging, intellectual and elevated dialogue: it’s an obvious proposal but that’s all it achieves. One of the most interesting conversations is when Sam (Michael Vlamis) questions Lex’s beliefs and they get into an allegorical discussion that gets stuck in the pool of popular thought and never manages to pose their ideas that, although for obvious reasons remain intangibles, become impossible during the rest of the film.

The Resort is a film that, just like the places the characters visit, is all over the place. From a slow build-up to a rushed ending, half of its runtime it’s just empty scenes that don’t add any value, half-baked puns, beautiful bodies swimming under the sun and questionable editing that turns it into a harder pill to swallow. Running at 75 minutes, most of the action happens after 40 minutes and the weirdness gets cranked 60-minute mark but not even this saves it from becoming irrelevant— it would’ve worked if it had gone all the way with a found-footage format instead.

3 OUT OF 10 BACKPACKS