Or, the one where the ghosts use The Force. Because that's pretty much the only new thing the ghost-hunting/mockumentary The Crying Dead brings to the table. Rather than a character getting dragged away from the camera, they get flung across the room as if by an angry Jedi. I mean, don't worry - you'll still get your 'person getting dragged away from the camera' fix (apparently a requirement in this sort of thing), but you get to see some people fly too. Stick around, and you'll see not one but two kinds of infrared cameras and some shitty ghosts too.
I guess They Crying Dead is a *little* different in that our characters are filming the pilot episode of a ghost-hunting show. So the characters don't really have any established personal dynamics... i.e. who's the leader, how they should interact with each other, etc. Although that does work as a convenient excuse to cover up as why none of them seem to have any chemistry, or why they seem unsure in front of the camera. It kind of makes me wonder if they even had a script for this thing, as there is very little connective tissue from one scene to the next (other than "oh no, so-and-so is missing, we should keep filming"). The Crying Dead kind of reeks of script by bullet point - on the one hand, it (theoretically) makes our actors sound more natural, but on the other hand, it just makes things feel kind of unfocused.
Our team is made of up six people: a producer, a cameraman, an equipment tech, and 3 investigators - two of whom seem pretty serious; the other is an actress hired to be the skeptic (although she seems the most scared of anyone - there isn't much consistency to her character). But once the shit eventually hits the fan, they are pretty much interchangeable anyways. They have traveled nine hours in an RV to an abandoned asylum that is scheduled to be demolished in a month and is rumored to be extremely haunted. They get a tour of the building, where a guide lists off all of the horrible things that have happened there - a bunch of medical experiments, a fire that killed three children (the titular crying dead), and some good old fashioned cannibalism. When the caretaker learns they were planning on spending the night to investigate, he says no dice, that's not what he agreed to. He's adamant, so the group returns to the RV and waits for the producer to straighten things out. When she can't they decide to do the logical thing, which is break into the building and film the show anyways. (I honestly don't know why this is a thing - they set up ALL of the equipment as usual, and don't seem hampered by their illegal entrance at all. NOTHING would have changed if they were just allowed to do their investigation.) And eventually bad stuff happens.
I suspect that the filmmakers knew that The Crying Dead was light on the scares - they try to juice it up with (mostly unrelated) footage of the asylum from when it was operational, and it's got that (annoying) faux-old film look. It's a bad way to start the film for two reasons. One, it doesn't really have anything to do with the story, and two, it gives away the big scares right of the bat (Jedi body tossing). Honestly, the Jedi-ness in the first minute is probably better than anything else you see in the film. Also, during the first act, they randomly toss in some footage from the end when the shit is going down. It's totally out of context and almost seems as though they are trying to assure the audience "trust us, some good stuff will happen."
There just isn't much confidence in the film, and rightfully so. It's pretty dull, and mostly consists of our crew just wandering around the hospital not really doing anything. They do try to set up some fake scares (moving a chair with a string, making fake noises in the background) which is a little intriguing, but nothing is really done with the concept. And when the ghosts show up, the effects are not good. At some point, I think they'd have been better off with just normal/non-FX'ed people playing ghosts - it would look better than the glowing/pseudo-translucent children that we get here.
As found footage? It's does okay. Other than a couple of musical stings during the big scares, I didn't notice any really big cheats. They have a lot of cameras around the asylum, so they can catch most of the "action" without betraying the basic concept. Notice "action" - there is a ton of shots here where they just cut to an empty room or hallway and nothing happens. I think that can work in some contexts, but they usually cut away so fast that you never have the time to become anxious. It's a weird choice.
I do love me some ghost-hunting movies, but unfortunately The Crying Dead wasn't all that enjoyable. It's never offensively stupid, but it just feels kind of flat and is not all that entertaining.
I would not recommend this film.
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