This is one of those movies that I've been wanting to see for a long time. Because of my policy of threatening to stab anyone who ruins the plot of a movie for me, I managed to avoid people telling me anything about the plot of this movie, and I refused to watch any trailers or read any reviews (or even a description of the movie) so I just knew that it was a horror movie, something to do with ghosts. After this many years, I've gleaned a few more details, so I know it's about a college professor who does some kind of experiments on people who claim to have contact with ghosts. Of course, I've also heard many people's opinions of this movie by now, and unfortunately, most of them say it's a bad movie, so I've put off watching it for awhile, not wanting to spend too much money on it in case it's terrible. Now's the time though (hey, I have to watch it eventually, and there's no time like the present, right?) I'm hoping it's good. Fingers crossed!
So as I said, this movie is about a college professor doing experiments on crazy people who claim to see and/or have contact with ghosts. Being crazy people, they're usually confined to asylums because people believe they are nuts, and most of them have made attempts on their lives (I might do that too, if I were being haunted and no one believed me). So the good doctor wants to bring these patients to a house, film them, and try to get some evidence of paranormal activity. He hopes to trap the paranormal activity, thus freeing the patients, so that's a good thing, right? Of course, he's just using people, poor haunted-ass possessed people whose demons (real or imagined) won't let them sleep. Sounds like hell. And there's a young man, not one of the students, just someone hired to do the filming, who seems to be haunted himself. Situations like this never end well, especially in horror movies.
This movie relies a lot on jump scares. I find these to be a cheap way of getting thrills. It's not difficult. Just have the movie be quiet, then suddenly introduce a loud noise, and boom! people jump. These types of scares actually usually work on me, though I'm not a huge fan. Our bodies react to certain stimuli, and we can't always help it...it doesn't mean there's any real filmmaking talent here. But in this particular movie, I could see most of the jump scares coming well before they happened, so they actually didn't work on me, which mainly left me annoyed instead of scared. The performances are good though, I will say that. I don't particularly like any of the characters, but the actors do a good job playing them.
This was before the whole found-footage craze really took off and every movie decided to try and use that method to cheaply and easily create some scares, so this is a straightforward movie with documentary-style clips interspersed with the story. It was kind of a relief, because while I've seen some great found footage films, I've seen some terrible ones too, especially lately, so I'm getting tired of them. The real problem with this movie, though, is that it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. It's got elements of mystery here, and it's got some horror elements and some supernatural elements, but it never seems to fall into one cohesive whole. Part of the problem is the PG-13 rating. I don't subscribe to the notion that PG-13 horror movies can't be good, and I've seen some good ones, but this movie just seems to cut away from anything interesting because of the rating. Some of the effects could have been scary if they didn't happen off-screen or weren't watered down to maintain a rating. And the script is really boring. That sounds mean, but it's true, by the end I didn't really care what was going on, I just wanted it over with, and that's not a good feeling for any movie. Overall, there were a few good scenes, but this movie just fell flat.
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