Whoa! From the people who brought me Saw AND Paranormal Activity?! Those are the greatest creative horror minds of the past decade! How could I NOT see this?! The only thing that could have made me want to see it more would be the involvement of Zack Snyder! Or someone related to something Twilight! It would be the perfect masterpiece of douchebaggery that the planet has ever seen! Who am I kidding, I paid to see this movie, so I guess I’m a douchebag. Shit. I’ve been talking shit on this movie ever since I saw an image from it, despite not really knowing what the plot was. I knew that the name was hard for me to pronounce, and still can’t, and knew it had something to do with ghosts. Someone compared it to Poltergeist, and I figured I’d give it a shot. Plus it was $6 day at the theater.

Although this ghost bitch looked similar to a corpse from the movie “Black Sabbath“, I think it was completely unintentional, because there’s no way anyone who made this movie has seen Black Sabbath.

There’s a relatively long opening credit sequence involving images of an empty house accompanied by a soundtrack that gives you the impression that music will be as important to this movie as the images. We see a family moving into a new house, Dad is a teacher, Mom is a stay at home parent, two young boys, and a baby girl. With the mom staying at home so often, she starts experiencing things that creep her out, from books coming off of shelves to hearing voices and an overall sense of unease. One boy goes to explore the attic, falls down, and goes into an unexplainable coma. Whoops! Doctors don’t know what the fuck is going on, but it seems the mom’s visions are getting worse and worse, to the point of seeing people in her house coming after her. Her husband agrees to move in hopes of their situation improving.

Rose Byrne just looks like a Jennifer Connelly stand-in, but she was in Sunshine, so she rules. That guy in the tie wishes he could be Steve Gonsalves, but never will be. Patrick Wilson is just glad that he didn’t need to have his dick cut off by Ellen Page for this movie.

Once they move, not only do the visions and experiences not go away, but they seem to get more intense. The grandmother explains that she believes all of these things are happening, and that she has also been experiencing things, and recommends people to come investigate. We get Ghost Hunter type investigators coming in who also experience things and so they call in their boss who is apparently some sort of clairvoyant. She determines that the boy is capable of astral projection, the soul leaving the body while asleep, and that the soul has strayed so far from the body that there are now other entities attempting to inhabit the child’s body. There’s a big scene involving a séance type thing where the clairvoyant wears a gas mask connected to headphones (?) to communicate with the boy and the entities. Seeing the power of the entities, it is determined that the only way to save the boy is for his father to use his own astral projection skills that he forgot he had (?) to retrieve him. He goes to retrieve him, all these entities try to kill everyone else while he’s astral projecting, the dad has to fight some demon things, and the boy is safely returned. Once the dad is back, he gets angry with the clairvoyant and strangles her, and we realize that one of the entities is now occupying the father, and the movie ends with him attacking his wife! Scary!

This is the first image I saw from this film, and, well, fucking look at how silly it is. This was taken from the trailer, so I’m not spoiling anything. However, given the context of the film, this image was intended to be one of the BIGGEST scares in the whole film, and it was ruined in the fucking trailer. Even Rampaige wasn’t scared, she said she thought that red guy was just in a rock n’ roll band and that he was “about to jump up to do a drum solo”. Ouch.

Goddammit. I already anticipated not liking this movie that much, but the first 40 minutes really pissed me off. Not because they were bad, but because they were surprisingly entertaining. The reason Paranormal Activity worked so well was because of the subtleties, and this film started off in the same way. It’s more of a “Hollywood” movie, so they weren’t incredibly subtle, but just enough to creep you out. Once the grandmother got involved, and after one “scare” in particular, everything went downhill with the subtlety. The entities and visions themselves were so over-the-top, it was on par with Drag Me To Hell. The difference being that Drag Me To Hell would go back and forth between incredibly obvious to extremely subtle, not really using the middle ground, whereas this movie was just a relatively slow build, up to the point that there were ghosts fighting and punching everyone and demons crawling around on walls for the last 15 minutes of the movie. I also have no idea what the Paranormal Activity involvement in this movie was, because the director was from the first Saw, as was the writer from the first Saw, and that annoying little piece of shit managed to weasel his way in to do a shitty acting job in a supporting role in this one too. Whoever tried to compare this movie to Poltergeist is a cocksucker. What they should have said was this movie would be the result of Saw, Paranormal Activity, Poltergeist, and Drag Me To Hell raping Jennifer Connelly, and then give that baby a violin after playing with its soft spot like it was the Pop-O-Matic from the Trouble board game.

Wolfman Moon Scale