Two teens, a handheld video camera, and acres of dark woods to explore. Think you know where this is going? When a central character spends enough time looking through the distorting lens of a camera, eventually something very nasty is going to show up. Such is the case with siblings Cristian and July, who research urban legends and post video diaries online. So the two are pleased to find out that a dead child is purported to haunt the woods bordering their remote summer home. Fernando Barreda Luna's Atrocious, told through the grainy film of the siblings' camera, turns out to be a bit more Blair Witch than ParanormalActivity as we're taken on a dizzying, bumpy ride through the labyrinth of trees in which the majority of the film takes place. The scares — though effective, even chilling — come in scarce fits and starts and without enough underlying suspense to save Atrocious from feeling only slightly less amateur than Cristian and July's home movies.
