It’s the first night on the job for Edward (Paul Syre, Chop Chop). The former Marine is pulling late-shift security at Wilshire Infirmary, a former psych hospital set for demolition. And as his supervisor (Mark Anthony Williams, Phat Girlz) informs him, the docs who used to run the place were into some freaky shit.

Like what? Oh, like experimenting with transferring patients’ minds into mannequins. Yep, Edward: Orientation is gonna be quite the bitch.

With that setup, I was game for first-timer Nicholas Pineda’s Infirmary, depicted through surveillance and body cameras. It’s unable to pay off, however. A pulse barely registers.

Hey, I get it: Flickering lights, power outages, creaking doors — they’re used so much in low-budget found footage because they’re cheap, if not free. But outside of middle-school sleepover pranks, they’re just not scary or effective. Plus, when you begin with a title card informing viewers two people were found deceased, and you introduce essentially a cast of three, we don’t exactly have to play Poirot.

Worse, the acting is pretty poor. Out of inexperience rather than incompetence, Syre can’t convincingly act lost in Wilshire’s maze of lookalike hallways, and poor Williams seems to have been told to improv what Samuel L. Jackson might be like if he just wanted to nap. I hate to say it, but I nearly joined him. —Rod Lott