After the atrocious movie I just finished watching, I was really hoping for something good. This movie has been on my radar for a little while. It got pretty bad reviews, but that has never stopped me from liking a movie before, and I have a migraine today, so I still don't want anything too deep, just a fun, creepy movie that doesn't totally suck.
This movie has some strikes against it. Aside from the bad reviews, most ads for this movie scream "James Wan Presents" which smacks of trying to hide the fact that your movie is terrible by associating it with someone known for better movies. But I like Maria Bello and Frank Grillo, so I decided to give it a chance anyway.
The movie was a little hard to follow at first, because it jumps back and forth in time a bit, but the acting was pretty good, even from the actors who weren't top billed. The plot isn't bad either, and it unfolds as the movie goes and gets more and more interesting. There's clearly not a huge budget, so the movie builds tension the old fashioned way, through dialogue and good acting, as well as the aforementioned jumps in time, which are easier to figure out once you see the patern they follow (see, THIS is how you make a low-budget horror movie...it IS possible).
The movie is a mix of ghost hunting college students (the past, starting about a week earlier) and a small-town police procedural drama (the present). There's also some history of horrible happenings from years ago that center around a house in this small town where the ghost hunting will take place. People setting out to find ghosts and then getting killed off is a storyline I'm sure most of us are familiar with, but the perspective of police looking into what happened after the horrible ghostly events took place puts a fresh spinach on an old idea.
As the movie unfolds, the cops find and unscramble the footage shot during the ghost hunting, and a survivor recounts what happens through flashbacks. Unlike purley found footage movies, where everything is shown through footage recorded while the events were happening and you wonder why the hell the characters continued filming while all this shit is going on, the movie uses regular old flashbacks interspersed with some of the found footage to enhance the story, but not relying totally on it. I like this approach. It worked for this movie. Of course, there's nothing really groundbreaking here, and most astute viewers will work out what's going on, and things get a little muddled in the end like they often do with this kind of storyline, but the movie is well made and we'll acted and it was exactly the kind of spooky fun I was looking for.
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