THE CRYING DEAD AKA THE WHISPERING DEAD documents members of a crew for a new paranormal reality show breaking into and staying overnight at an abandoned hospital, where they encounter more than they bargained for.
This found footage movie was released the same year as GRAVE ENCOUNTERS (2011), a thematically virtually identical but far superior found footage movie which demonstrates how much potential was unrealized here.
The prologue shows old footage of some kind of experiment but then nothing later in the movie ties into it. The actual ghosts are not given the prologue treatment. Also, there is a tale of cannibals and of a patient who cut his nurse that go nowhere. The crew members just disappear and we never know what exactly happens to them. The motivations of the supernatural beings are entirely unclear, which is surprising, given how much time the movie spends recounting the history of the hospital. In short, this is one of the more disjointed found footage movies I have seen.
Everything is predictable from a mile away, save for one mild twist: when the first supernatural events occur, the crew members still think that it is prank played on them; and the motivation for thinking so is actually plausible. Actually, the order in which the team members are picked off one by one was also something I did not predict, but the end result was all the same. There are no really new ideas here.
Finally, the way the ghosts are introduced and used for horror is pretty bad. It is really obvious that the ghosts are just a special effect, and for a moment I thought this was actually meant to be a plot twist in which someone sets up hokey ghosts to scare the crew or something.
Some of the scenes had the potential to be scary, but the victims are dispatched far too soon to unsettle the audience, and then, as mentioned, we never find out what precisely happens to them.
Finally, I don't understand why so many found footage movies make their characters so unlikable. I understand that for dramatic purposes, it is good to have characters with tragic flaws, but we the audience still have to be able to look beyond that to care for them.
I did not rate this lower because, despite the disjointedness, the story itself was fairly coherent and the movie had at least some atmosphere.
Overall, I consider this a below average found footage film. Some more recent and better found footage treatments of the same concept are HOLLOWS GROVE (2014) and GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM (2018).
