BY Linda Winsh-Bolard
The most surprising part of this project is the power of marketing.
Paramount Pictures executed meticulous marketing campaign using all the social media and web resources to sell, for immense profit, an average, boring film that would otherwise collect dust on some forgotten shelf.
A young couple moves into large suburban house and begins to experience oddities in their domestic paradise. Katie (Katie Featherston) is a graduate student who had, since her childhood, had occasional feelings of strange presence, even invasion that somehow, inexplicably threatened her life. Her fiancé, a stockbroker, Micah (Micah Sloat) is both curious if this is possible and determined to protect his girlfriend. They invite parapsychologist (Mark Friedrichs) to help them.
The entire movie takes place in their house and very small garden. The cast is 6 people total. The plot is very basic: Katie thinks that she is being threatened by unnatural powers and seeks help. To prove to Micah (and the audience) that the threat is “real” we hear and see things that cannot be explained unless we accept that there are unnatural powers in the play. To modernize the plot, the authors employed a video camera within the video shot story. Micah wants to capture the “presence” on tape and installs a video camera in their bedroom to record everything that happens while they are sleeping. During the day he tapes mostly Katie although sometimes the camera seems to be left on while they interact.
As a medium cool (nobody remembers that film which is a pity) the device helps. It creates a story within a story and breaks the tedium.
Despite the hype, the film is tedious. For the first 50 minutes I kept waiting for the paranormal, frightening activity that would keep me on edge. I was disappointed. Nothing unusual, absurd, terrifying or paranormal made an appearance. The film was boring.
I truly cannot imagine that in real life people would freak out listening to creaking or falling sounds in their house. Especially new, large house in the usual, flimsy suburban development. Creaks and sights all the time. I understand that the budget was limited, so were the special effects. Someone clearly clapped and walked up and down the stairs. So what? Which part was scary? Was it when I, in film induced ennui, was considering how much all those overlarge housing development resemble one another? How fake they are, and how everything in them is so obviously cheap mass produced second taste copy, including the furniture? Or when I was feeling grateful that Katie and Micah look like ordinary, plain people? Or when I was thinking: no wonder Wall Street collapsed if all their dealers spend so little time working.
The film would have been frightening had the director presented the house- prison as a parable for our society, which is growing more and more disassociated from the rest of the developed world and within which we are disassociated from one another. Had it been an allusion to entrapment of a society that promises freedom while illegally wiretapping its citizens, prosperity while giving majority of its riches to 1% of population and opportunity while squeezing people’s minds as well as purses, it would have been a scary film. Unfortunately, it was clear than no such idea ever occurred to the director. It was clear that the creators had enjoyed themselves while creating a “thriller” by running up and down the hallways of cheaply build, overpriced cracker box.
I am told that people were leaving the theaters crying. Had I paid $12 for the ticket plus gas and parking to see it, I would have had left the theater weeping copiously while cursing my own stupidity and bad luck.
You want urban scary? I‘ll give you scary! Here we go:
It was the last day of October, the night when the window between the living and the dead worlds opens, the very night when the border between the life and death disappears and all that lives in the night comes out.
That night he opened the door and there were nine. Nine of them. Each equipped with 20 claws, a tail, set of sharp teeth and unquenchable appetite.
It was dark, and they were hungry.
It was 3 meals since they were given wet food, and dry food is so boring. Last night their boxes were not cleaned out either. They were angry. No cuddles, no snacks…
He opened the door and nine of them came out…ready to get their dues.
Now, that’s really scary.
