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I was highly suspicious of this title from its amateurish introductory credits, but I'd had rather good experiences with similarly close-to-zero budget films like "Bad Ben" and the like so I kept watching. Mercifully the camera was professional enough and had the proper frame rate so as not to look like a home movie.
the story involves a bumbling crew of a show, led by Anton and the Australian Mick, either tv or internet, that investigates ghost stuff. they get drawn into an investigation by the promise of 50,000 dollars if they stay the night there.
The guy brings his crew along and for reasons largely unknown, the vast majority of the footage in the film is done in a dark, neon-blue where it's never made clear if this is the result of the lighting or a creative choice.
For the longest time, I was not at all bored by this film and looking forward to the spooks involved. I was severely let down when the spooks involved actually came. Rather than go the route of "Bad Ben" and make use of very minimalist effects and imagery, this film tries to get what it wants, and with the budget and visual effects available, ends up with attempted spooks that come across laughable at how bad they look and how unusually they are shot.
Much of the film's conflict centers around one of them, Roach, wanting to leave and getting very angry about it, while the leader Anton tries to keep the group together and staying in the house, to the point where Mick confers with Anton and it's revealed he's not really Australian and is putting on an act. This might have been vaguely interesting if something, anything at all were done with it, but nothing was.
Instead, after chaos ensues with the ghosts and Roach either dies or was being impersonated by one of the ghosts and then the ghost stops impersonating her and they find her body after she'd died hours ago, then Terrance gets possessed by a ghost and inexplicably dies in a brief scuffle with Mick.
Out of absolutely nowhere, Anton pulls a gun on Mick and starts threatening to kill him and ordering him to stay. Inexplicably they're mortal enemies talking to each other like they've secretly hated each other all along, and then yet another brief scuffle breaks out in which Mick somehow dies despite Anton not using the gun. Mick's body then disappears and Anton runs around before passing out and waking up in the morning.
Finally, all this meandering nonsense is over, and Anton picks up the check from the woman who owns the house. She had been very polite and cordial with them at the beginning, and is polite and cordial here, when inexplicably she suddenly becomes almost aggressively hostile, basically telling him never to come by again and that if she never sees him again, it would be a good thing.
Inexplicably the film is still not over as we get constant snippets of Anton watching the news report on his wacky adventures, mad that the news reporter apparently doesn't take seriously the disappearance of 3 people, then him going on vacation in Haiti and the Bahamas. Suddenly while he's filming himself showing off a ring, he drops the camera and the ring, and apparently just disappears. We get an end text essentially saying he and the ring disappeared and that's it.
The incoherent way in which this was shot, combined with the inexplicably important elements suddenly showing up like the ring make it seem like this movie was very poorly edited, which may or may not explain the nonsensical tone of this film.
score 2/10
phenomynouss 18 March 2018
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4095435/ |
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14-4-2021 18:05:05