From the watchers of Paranormal Activity comes A movie so bereft of quality in every aspect of it's production, from conception to final credit, so devoid of a single interesting or original idea, that I hope whoever made it is working in a pizza place right now, wondering what went wrong.
Two guys with Richard Grieco beards want to film a documentary about Typhoid Mary in this bad script where the actors explain everything in great detail in the first 20 minutes so the audience understands exactly how mundanely in depth the writer thinks his characters and story are.
So these two buddies from College, one a horror nut and the other a failed director who looks like Tom Cruise circa 1988 with a chromosome or two missing, along with the horror nuts wife, decide to go into this old asylum where Typhoid Mary died and hook up a bunch of cameras to try and detect ghosts or some shit. Oh goodie, there's nothing I enjoy more than numerous exhilarating shots of computer monitors, complete with the loud squelching and humming that comes with said shots to let us know there's something scary about the nothing that's happening. I also just love when the red "REC" graphic is on screen so much it might as well get top billing. At this point I'd rather watch a documentary on the history of editing software than another shitty movie full of these shitty effects.
At one point while conducting interviews with people somehow related to the Typhoid Mary case, Tom Cruise talks with a young lady whose Uncle was involved. She say's that she doesn't know much about the story but he's welcome to look through a bunch of old documents she's inherited, if he doesn't mind dark, dirty basements. They both react to this statement as if it's sexual innuendo in what appears to be a beguiling attempt to act as if they're flirting.
It just gets worse from there. The guys wife gets possessed when she tries to perform a seance, even though her acknowledged knowledge of seances amounts to "my mom used to do them". This leads to shots DIRECTLY lifted from Paranormal Activity of her laying in a bed with a camera focused on her. Confronted with a catatonic and possessed wife, and "spooky" shit happening to them, they guys lament that this is actually good, because they can probably get rich off of this documentary.
Our two leads argue a lot, leading to scenes of conflict for no other reason than that the writer knows that conflict is a thing that happens between characters in movies, motivations or sense be damned.
There are stupefying scenes involving a scientist and an exorcist that exist only to make what up until this point was a dumb script, into a head shakingly intricate, and if possible, even dumber script.
The acting and writing are horrible. The direction is derivative. The film is dark but lacks any atmosphere and the one or two scares are just cheap jump moments. I've rarely watched an entire movie and been so uncaring about the fates of any of the characters.
This movie is not to content to just suck, it wants to suck in frighteningly intricate detail. I know a few amateur film makers, and I've seen them make some bad movies, but in their heads they've got what they think are really amazing stories. You never wanna be the guy to sit them down and say, whoa buddy, nobody but you could possibly give a shit about any of this, don't max out your credit cards and waste countless peoples lives on this crap. But someone has to. Maybe somebody should start a crisis hotline for this affliction. I don't know anyone involved with creating this movie, but I know for certain that at some point the guy who wrote this thing sat down with his friends and explained the characters and the story, and did it with excitement and joy, full of vigor, resplendent in the awesomeness of his idea. I hope at least one of his friends smacked the living shit out of him.
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