Mia Faith in They’re Watching (Best Served Cold Productions)

For its first hour, They’re Watching is an entertaining enough found-footage flick before it descends into a maelstrom of mediocre horror, terrible special effects, and an absurd Tales from the Darkside-finale. It transforms from a film made in this century to something Full Moon Features would have tossed in the reject pile in 1992.

It’s billed as a horror/comedy, and it start off well enough as we meet the camera crew of a third-rate home improvement show, Home Hunters Global. They have traveled to Moldova (“an affordable gem,” according to the show’s rote voice-over) to revisit an American living there to see how she fixed up her way, way deep-in-the-woods cottage. All the players are attractive: you have the smoldering, handsome photographer, Greg (David Alpay), who has been to Afghanistan but doesn’t want to talk about it; Sarah (Mia Faith), the perky, young assistant who’s just out of film school; and the hyper, wisecracking sound guy who always stays juuuuust on the right side of annoying.

So, we’re dealing with tropes, and that’s fine. It’s well acted, and clearly the filmmakers are more interested in entertainment. Every beat is hit: the peasant woman who stands under the Sarah’s window all day, the menacing locals who follow the crew, and the expat who really, really, REALLY wants to show them the cellar. All a harmless and enjoyable buildup to the horror show that is to come.

And it is a horror show, but not, I suspect, in the manner that writer/directors Jay Lender and Micah Wright were expecting. After an hour of straightforward if snarky repartee and a decent buildup of suspense, we finally realize what happened to the poor hunky cameraman in Afghanistan, and the genie is out of the bottle, never to be let back in. His backstory is so disturbing and out of sync with the rest of the film that you stare at the screen agog. It’s as if Sam Malone drew himself a cold one and started delivering Kurtz’s monologue from Apocalypse Now.

And then the reveal, which you saw coming a mile away, gives way to a massacre of villagers, with special effects which would have been the height of technology in, say, 1983. It’s seems like the entire film devolves into a video game, and when you glance at one of director Micah Wright’s credits and see that he wrote Call of Duty II: Black Ops, you realize it IS a video game. And the gore is laughably bad.

It’s disappointing, because for a while, you’re rooting for these guys. Everyone likes a good time waster. A couple of laughs, a few jolts, and off to bed. But viewers do not like being hoodwinked.