Going into this film, I wasn't sure what to expect. The title and box/poster image made me think it might be some hokey attempt to translate all of the currently popular ghost hunting shows on television into a horror film.
I was close, but I wasn't quite on the mark.
The set-up is simple enough: we have some flashbacks to 1982, when a family is murdered in their house. It's not horrifyingly messy or gory, and it's all shot in glorious...sort-of-muddy-grey-green. Anyway, then we cut to some night vision footage of a woman who we can surmise, thanks to some handy explanatory titles on the screen, is our doomed ghost hunter. The rest of the story (up to a point at the end) is presented as having taken place in 2002, and we're left to believe that the film is a reconstruction from the records of events, i.e. journal entries, audio recordings, and camera footage.
I want to pause right here. This film is in the false document and found footage genres to a degree. They go the whole route of telling us that this is based on actual events and blah-blah...the same sort of thing we've heard, and that many people have fallen for, since the days of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre film. There's even a brief joking shout-out by two characters to The Blair Witch Project; I thought that whole shaky-cam-I'm-so-sorry joke was way outdated, but maybe it's so very outdated that it's funny again? I just don't know.
Also, if they would have us believe that this is a reconstruction of real events, even for a moment's fun in the film, why is the acting so wooden and stilted? It doesn't come across as accidentally that way. It seems as if the director wanted it like that, perhaps in some attempt to preserve the realism of everything. That doesn't work for me. Why can't it all be as good as the reconstructions on Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted? Now that's acting.
Anyway, our ghost hunter arrives at the Masterson house in Arizona and is greeted by Seth Masterson, the nephew of the father of the murdered family from the prologue. Apparently no one has stayed at the house in the twenty years since the murders, yet the place is kept pretty cleaned up, with even the dust sheets on the furniture regularly changed. There's a brief interview with the cleaning lady, who claims to have had physical contact with some ghostly presence, and then our other actors/players/doomed meatbags arrive. There's the slight-stoner-average-white-guy camera technician, the spicy-latina journalist, and a very strange, sort of mousy, sort of bitchy, fundamentalist Christian chick who claims to represent the church of which the murdered family's father was a founder.
The rest of the film is watchable enough, with shades of The Haunting (but not in a good-movie way), Carrie (uber-Christian girl gets her period BAD and bleeds through her skirt while in a room which had shown heavy activity), and every paranormal investigation show that's now on television. Along the way characters translate Electronic Voice Phenomena, smoke, freak out, pee in suitcases (no, seriously. Also, EWWW.), and experience some very big, very obvious ghostly activity.
Overall, this movie doesn't have a great deal to recommend it. It's not bad, but it's not really new or innovative. The best moment of watching it, for me, was when one of the characters mentions having been involved with a paranormal society, and how some of the members suffered from "overactive imaginations, which damaged their credibility a little bit" and my nephew Adrian said "They also suffered from overactive bladder, which damaged their pants a little bit!" Bah-ZING, what a riff, eh?
Anyway, the twist of the film's end is less a twist than a big, obvious DUH! Overall, I actually found the whole viewing to be a bit depressing. There is an adorable little ghost girl played by a young actress named Sophia Morgan Stewart; if we see her in anything else, she'll probably join Mackenzie Brooke Smith (why do so many kid actors use all of their names?) as one of the kids that Adrian and I "awwww" at every time we see them.
Overall, using my patented Angela rating system, I give this film
Half a staring Angela.
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