Sunday, December 5, 2010

'Movie Review'-Paranormal Entity

So stop me if you've heard this plot before-a woman is haunted by a supernatural creature, and the family decide to record footage as the attacks get progressively worse throughout the month. Unfortunately the residential exorcist is out of town, but leaving isn't an option as the daemon keeps following her.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Only this isn't Paranormal Activity. No, this is Paranormal Entity. And it's a tiny bit different. For starters, the actors are worse in this one. And there's a lot more shameless nudity.

Created by 'The Asylum' studios Paranormal Entity is called a 'mockbuster', meaning an independent studio which tries to cash in on a blockbuster movie. The Asylum has brought us such classics as Snakes on a Train, The Terminators, and many others.





The production credits are missing from this movie, and I'm not sure if the actor's name, Shane Van Dyke, is a real name. Suffice to say, mockbusters shamelessly try to cash in on the work that people spent several months trying to create and should not be bought under any circumstances.

So how does this movie hold up when compared to the original? It doesn't. Oh, this movie tries to be scary, and has a couple of new tricks. But the actors in the original were better, the scares a lot more subtle, and worst of all, this piece of garbage spoils everything within the opening narration and on the box cover-everyone dies, except one character who dies a few days later. Wow! Spoiler much?

Whatever good scenes there could have been are explained off-camera. In Paranormal Activity, there is a scene when Katie is dragged on the floor and the door slams shut behind her. Simple, but effective. That did happen in Paranormal Entity, but in the hotel room. When the camera wasn't turned on. Because that would be too expensive to show.



The worst part is the ending, when the local exorcist finally gets back from vacation and seems to have a handle on the situation. He tells the family that he needs their concentration-and in the very next scene, he's dead on the ground. What?? What happened there? I guess they didn't concentrate hard enough.

 The tagline for the boxart (which I decided not to put up for gory reasons) is 'Decide the truth for yourself.' What truth? That this movie is a rip-off? I can't even begin to list how much it steals from the original.  Virtually everything from the sets to the scares has been copied, some of it laughably so. This is what people on youtube do for fun. It's a shame this 'movie' actually made it to a DVD.

FINAL GRADE: 1/2 out of 5. It gets half a point for having a mildly scary scene from time to time. But I don't support plagerism. And yet I bought this movie...dangit!


You know what this movie needs? A super ethnic nanny who puts wooden crosses in olive oil. They might have survived after that.

1 comment:

Chris H said...

Mockbusters aren't all bad though. You should check out The Asylum's Sherlock Holmes. Not only is it their first genuinely good, entertaining movie, it's also bizarrely awesome and absurd.