One of the favorite parlor games of movie devotees is trying to discern which films and filmmakers have the greatest impact and influence in any given era. For example, at different times, I’ve heard it argued that the most significant work of the decade, at least in terms of shaping the films that followed, was either the attention-craving overt coolness of Quentin Tarantino, the controlled, fetishistic nihilism of David Fincher or the proudly lazy, pot-haze comedy of Kevin Smith. Those three all inspired opportunistic adherents, but it largely seems like the slavish aping of their efforts became viewed, quite rightly, as a stylistic dead end. On the other hand, the whole new subgenre popularized by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project is as strong as ever. Given that it’s even echoed all the way to the fjords of Norway, it may be fair to say we have a winner.

Troll Hunter, the new horror film from director André Øvredal, is presented as found footage, video that mysteriously showed up one day. Adhering to the cheeky and familiar convention, opening title cards attest to the veracity of what will follow, though they’re also tinged with a little bewilderment, as if even the filmmakers can’t quite believe what they have on their hands. But, they assure the viewer with spooked gravity, it’s all completely true. In this case, it’s not a haunted suburban home or a skyscraper-tall monster marauding through New York City. Instead, it’s a significant population of covert trolls, proving the folklore true by tromping along across the Norwegian tundra with a snarling, battle-weathered, government-backed hunter following their sizable trails.

The film has all the making for good, flaky fun, and it does have just the right level of humor to it: not too little to seem ridiculously serious about its topic and not too much to let the film slide into unappealing satire. What it doesn’t have is anything that really grabs the interest. Disregarding traditional narrative forms doesn’t mean that every standard element of that approach should be disregarded. Character development in mightily important in a film like this, but every last person moving through the screen in painfully generic, almost to the point of being wholly interchangeable. The actual trolls are impressive enough when they appear–particularly after adjusting the wow scale to account for a presumably limited budget–but there’s an awful lot of drag between those scenes. The phony documentary conceit may have once added tension, but that’s no longer the case. It’s just another way to film the material, and not one that’s especially novel, either. There are a lot of descriptors I can imagine hanging on a movie titled Troll Hunter. Dull isn’t one of them, but it surely applies here.