Paramount's Circle of Eight started as a 10-part webseries directed by Stephen Cragg, a man who has worked almost exclusively as a director-for-hire in the TV world. I think that information is sufficient enough for most to make a decision as to whether or not it is worth their time, but seeing as that would make for a superficial review, I'll give it more attention than most ever will in the hope that most will never have to.

I don't want to make it sound like I have it in for all content that begins its life on the web. Far from it, actually. There are a lot of smart, creative people out there who turn to the Internet as a means for distribution and in doing so embrace the pros and cons of the medium. Circle of Eight, on the other hand, was produced in large part by a major motion picture studio's relatively unproductive Digital Entertainment division (last thing they did was 2005's Jackass 2.5). This tells me one thing: it wasn't good enough to turn into a movie.

Whether it was indeed ever intended to be a movie and Paramount just shuffled it to the Digital Entertainment division or whether the latter developed it from the ground up with this intention, I do not know. Doesn't really matter where it was supposed to start its life, however, as Circle of Eight was stillborn.

It opens with a fire consuming an apartment. The footage of a ball about to drop on TV tells us it's New Years Eve. Unable to escape the flames, an unidentifiable person jumps out of the window right as police officers are racing toward the building. Cut to a fresh faced gal, Jessica, driving down the streets of LA listening to "Let The Flames Go Higher" by Eagles of Death Metal. Watch her drive around the streets of LA for the entire duration of the song, before she arrives at the Dante, her new apartment building.

Jessica then spends about the next twenty or so minutes wandering around the dank old building meeting all of her oddball fellow Dante'ites who are all supposed to be 'cooky' because they're 'artists or writers or whatever'. And though I tire of scripts that make it out like every artist in LA is a nutjob, this is actually the best part of the movie. These side characters are all delightfully weird and none of them have any problem barging into Jessica's room without knocking to talk her ear off, paint her, or film her.

After the introductions, however, the movie then spends an inordinate amount of time tormenting Jessica by having her discover a dead body one minute only to have all the tenants convince her she's crazy the next. After this "where'd the body go, you're all in on it" syndrome plays out more than once you start to wonder if this is a bad remake of Let's Scare Jessica to Death (her namesake, no doubt). Fortunately for the legacy of that classic bit of '70s horror, it is not, but it threatens to reveal itself as such for the bulk of the movie.

What ends up being revealed, is rather uneventful and instead of surprising the audience, it just serves as the final nail in the coffin that was the last 80 minutes of your life. The performances and video quality are all above-average for what I've seen from other webseries, but a cast with model faces (save for DJ Qualls, but he's barely in it) and an HD camera are not sufficient enough on their own. They lack the requisite motivation to maintain a modicum of interest to the end.

In Circle of Eight's defense, this might not have been the case when it was an actual webseries. Multiple, eight-minute installments might have gone a long way to break up the monotony of everything. I don't know. But as a feature-length movie available now on DVD, the problems are glaring and the whole production becomes an endurance test. And in my book, there's nothing worse than a laboriously mediocre horror movie.