Ed's Review Dot Com

Exclusive Media Group, Hammer Film Productions, Traveling Picture Show Company (TPSC),

Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Erin Richards, Olivia Cooke, Rory Fleck-Byrne

A professor, Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) puts together a team of college students to do some experiments on a very troubled young girl, Jane (Olivia Cooke). Professor Coupland rejects any ideas of paranormal and believes that it’s just manifestation of negative energy that can be extracted and captured. Jane soon brings out Evey, the evil spirit which does harm to Jane and to the other students who have her locked up in a remote house for their experiments as the ratchet the pressure up step by step with their tests. Soon everything is out of control.

This new horror film bears the headlines, “Based on true events”. Uh, no. Technically it’s based on an idea from the 70’s in Canada where a team tried to figure out if you could create a ghost in your mind, something like that. It bears no similarity at all to this movie. This is really far fetched. It is a really scary film, but the scary stuff is much more bangs and screams at unexpected times, and is sort of a Halloween horror maze type of film. There isn’t really much going on here. Reality is pretty thin, and they really rely on the excellent speaker systems in today’s theater to scare you, although someone sitting behind you with a metal pan and a spoon could whack it from time to time and scare you about the same amount.

There seems to be a market for horror films right now. There haven’t been a lot lately. But I have a feeling this one won’t do much box office wise. It just doesn’t have enough going for it to make it at today’s box office prices. When we saw this, we chose the bargain matinee price and picked a 5PM showing. We were alone in the theater (on opening day) for quite a while when two or three groups of very young teens (probably 12 or 13 for the most part) and sat scattered around the theater. They kicked seats, talked out loud, laughed and giggled, and enjoyed playing like kids in a playground and paid very little attention to anything. I guess that goes to show how little was going on here. Another complaint….a student was recruited to be the “cameraman” and document everything that happens. That gives them the license to use the handheld camera to run down the hall making everyone sick once again. I’ve already complained about “found footage” movies before. Fortunately most of the film is really filmed, and the camera work was pretty well done throughout. The main problem with this movie is that it just doesn’t build much in the way of suspense, and it relies on cheap startle type scares to keep you on the edge of the seat. I would say this is okay when it eventually hits the video market, but I don’t recommend this one, especially in the theater. It’s just not that good.

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