In the hopes of earning a grant to launch the very first parapsychology course at their university, a group of science students look into the urban legend of ‘The Mole Man’, an ex-patient who is thought to still be living within the halls of an abandoned asylum.

Director Krisstian de Lara and Gorilla Studios Miami bring their urban legend to life in the upcoming thriller, Investigation 13. A slasher film that employs psychological aspects in both its premise and setting, Investigation 13 has its characters using some pretty sweet-looking tech for them being starving college students. The result? A movie comprised of found footage, Google-glasses-esque night-vision, and of course, good old fashioned film to make a cliché premise a little more updated. Along the way of their investigation, the film’s characters find, as one of the taglines states, that some legends should be left alone.

Lucky for us they in fact do not leave this urban legend alone, as we find the crew — satanic pixie nightmare girl Stephanie Hernandez, ‘Chris Pine type’ Patrick Flanagan, too sweet to live Giordan Diaz, static Jesse Ramos, and token character William Alexander — trudging into an insane asylum in search of “the Mole Man”. No, not the old man from the Simpsons or those subterranean dwelling New Yorkers (unfortunately) but rather a slasher who shares their name and is played by Peter Aratari in the movie. Though the film uses some high-tech camera mediums, it has a decidedly 90s feel to me, but not in a good way — an I Know What You Did Last Summer quality to it. Perhaps it is the cast of disposable 2-dimensional attractive people, the predictable scenes with an ending that you can see from a mile away, the trying too hard to seem authentic by having curse-word heavy dialogue and the characters asking silly questions when they should be getting out of dodge? Despite these downfalls, the movie slashes up with its high body count, producing a blood bath that you can dive into.

In the film, Krisstian de Lara and screenwriter Clay Smith make the artistic choice to kick things off with a cold opening of… the ending? However, we are soon re-introduced to the crew, un-bloodied and preparing for their latest supernatural survey. Wanting to prove scientifically that spirits exist in order to have their school instate a course dedicated to the study of ghosts, their team of self-proclaimed scientists gets their big break when they secure permission to conduct an investigation on the reportedly haunted grounds of the abandoned mental institution, Black Grove Asylum. Their 12th investigation was seemingly mired in tampering and ridicule, so the team takes careful precaution to document everything, including a tour with facilities owner Layla Parrish (Meg Foster of Twin Peaks!), who tells them the story of “the Mole Man”. The star patient of the insane asylum was a man by the name of Leonard Craven, who as a child suffered physical and sexual abuse from his drug addict parents, eventually scalping them and being declared mentally insane. As legend has it, Leonard Craven suffered still from the shock therapy and neglectful asylum attendants, and one day was released from confinement when a nurse performed a Native American ritual on him… With the birth of the Mole Man urban legend, this spiritualized ex-mental patient is said to still roam the halls of Black Grove Asylum, which tempts the crew to set up their cameras in order to capture evidence of his existence, and therefore, of a spectral afterlife. Locked within the facility until Layla returns in the morning, the team learns of the unspeakable things that happened there and that neither the spirits nor they can leave.

The 13 in the title makes it sound more ominous, no? Naming the killer Craven inspires feelings of horror, right? I feel like all these questions passed through the minds of writers de Lara, Smith, and co-writer Rolando Vinas when penning this film, as the tropes were made all too obvious. It is formulaic and not in a meta sort of way, and it is pretty easy to tell from the trailer that there is not a lot of substance in Investigation 13. I sojourned through the first 30 minutes, and then another, and then another, and after that hour and a half foray into cliché kingdom and forced dialogue I came out with nothing to take away from this movie. The dialogue had way too much foreshadowing to the point where I already knew what scenes were coming up and the movie pretty much writes itself because it has all been done before. One interesting feature of the movie was its mixed media technique, using animation to tell the background stories and flashbacks to the life of Leonard Craven. The animation sequences were effective, and I found them to be very stylish like Hanna-Barbera limited movement animation or something like Tales of the Black Freighter, though coming back to the live-action from them was clunky as the transitions were abrupt and not even introduced in the dialogue of conversations. Seeing as how this is supposed to be a slasher film, it is unfortunate that the animation was what I remember most.

It is also a little disappointing when I find that an urban legend film is not based upon a real-life urban legend but is instead created out of the mind without anecdotal experiences on record, the result is that there is nothing to investigate afterward and I feel as though I’ve been taken on a ride to nowhere. In any case, thanks to Uncork’d Entertainment, who has been churning out mostly hits as of late, Investigation 13 will be viewable September 10th, 2019 via digital and DVD, but whether it is worth a watch is another story.