Director M. Night Shyamalan funded this small and unique film himself to regain "creative control". Honestly, it isn't half bad!
To help their mother cope with a divorce and have fun with her life, two siblings go to spend a week living with their grandparents, the daughter attempting to film their experience to give their troubled mother some closure. But when they arrive, they find that their grandparents are... strange.
M. Night Shyamalan has perhaps the biggest career implosion in recent memory. His first major debut The Sixth Sense was a massive success, follow-ups Unbreakable, Signs and The Village are mostly successful, he was considered "The Next Spielberg".
But public and critics alike started to bore of his screenplays relying on twist gimmicks, and Lady in the Water and The Happening virtually destroyed his career; people began to view him as a egotistical hack.
He went onto more traditional genre films and even franchise movies with The Last Airbender and After Earth... Yeah, no one wanted to watch a film with Shyamalan's name attached after those.
The Visit feels like not so much a return-to-form for Shyamalan but in fact it is completely unique in his filmography. It is shot as a found-footage style film as the daughter Becca (something of a wannabe director) starts to make a documentary about her grandparents, but don't misunderstand, this isn't "A Shyamalan found-footage movie" in the bad sense, which would probably put most people off. It is probably the most legitimate found-footage film I've seen since REC or Paranormal Activity, due to its dedication to the genre; there's no music and things are filmed only within reason.
The choice of doing a found-footage film even offsets it from the director's other movies; there's no stiff, slow pans or tracking shots, no weirdly out of place monologues. It feels refreshing.
Plus, the acting is good. Most found-footage movies suffer from being cheap productions with a lack of talent in front of the screen, but somehow Shyamalan has got a good set of actors for this movie. All of whom are relative newcomers, though their grandfather, Pop Pop, is played by Peter McRobbie who featured prominently in the recent Marvel Daredevil Netflix show. All do exceptional jobs as excitable kids and strangely homely grandparents.
It is by far a perfect movie though. There's a moment when it strays too far into the sub-genre's well established cliches, the young boy's rapping is a little... unbearable (but I can totally see this as what a kid like him would do) and it is a terribly simple experience; it is only ninety minutes long.
But it definitely benefits from its sly self-awareness and surprisingly good setup (again, a rare thing in the sub-genre) it has a good sense of humour throughout that really makes your question if there is actually anything wrong. After all, the film is from the perspective of children, they don't rightly know what they are experiencing. That said, there are some creepy moments and at least two scares that did actually get me.
But, you have to be in the mood for it. People will either like it or hate it, and others will dismiss it outright because of Shyamalan's body of work, unfairly. The Visit isn't setting the world on fire, but I had fun with it mostly because I got the humour, and it is nice to see Shyamalan rise above the crippling weight of past mistakes.
"All the activity has led to this"? Well that's just unfortunate really.
Following the events of Paranormal Activity 2 and after Katie and young Hunter disappeared, we follow another family, their daughter Alex, her boyfriend and her younger brother Wyatt. You guessed it, paranormal activity starts happening around their house, around the same time a mysterious young boy and his mother move in across the street.
My biggest problem with this film, asides the total lack of scares, is that its the exact same plotting as the third film. We have the same set up; there's nothing wrong until a ceiling light wobbles, there's constant pranks by the characters, demons being obsessed with children's toys, replace two young girls with two young boys, and generally nothing happening for the first hour.
Yes, the fourth film takes an hour (fifty-three minutes exactly) before anything actually "paranormal" happens. Of a ninety-six minute run time.
Now we are set in "modern day", this house is festooned with laptops. It is established early on that these laptops record everything their web cameras film and they film all the time (no sleep mode for these computers) so they hide them about the house to film the activity. Funny how they never view the footage, like when Alex is levitated off the bed.
Personal gripe about horror films nowadays. Consider: when you are in pitch darkness and are carrying a laptop with you (just go with it) do you run through the dark with the screen illuminating your beautiful face? No. No one would do that! You would turn the screen around to light your surroundings, you see less with a big bright light in your face! It is the equivalent of pointing the flashlight into your face.
You will see that this film made me ask all the wrong questions under the conditions of a badly made movie. There are, for the first time in the series, inconsistencies with the recorded footage. A time stamp in the corner of the screen normally represents a recording, but PA4 decides to sometimes remove the stamp... for no reason. This and sudden jump cuts, not even blurring, static cuts, just an edit that saves a character the time of walking across a room.
The plot goes absolutely nowhere since Paranormal Activity 3 since it spends so much time retreading the same "scare" beats and setup. This series is now worse than the Saw films.
There's so little to actually say about this film, those it does make the third part appear good.
Additional Marshmallows: I didn't even talk about the Xbox Kinnect gimmick, which is conveniently the meeting spot for the ghosts.
The best scares were the movie's characters pulling pranks on one another.
With Paranormal Activity 2 following the events of the first film, it is only logical in the studio's mind to crank out a prequel for the third part. We see Katie from the first film as a child, and witness the start of her demonic experiences through the eyes of a skeptical mother and a camera wielding step-father.
Maybe I will reconsider it if I watch it again, but Paranormal Activity was excellent in my opinion, I even wrote a post about how I felt its fixed camera gimmick was clever in forcing the viewer to keep watching. Other critics disagreed, and what we have now is exactly what those critics said: protracted silent moments of waiting for household objects to move.
It took a miserable five minutes before I was demanding this guy put his camera down just once (what a gent: filming two women carry boxes into the basement instead of helping out) I was honestly surprised when he didn't rescue the camera during an "earthquake". Even during family trauma (potentially aggravated by having cameras everywhere) his response to being asked to put the camera down: "No, it's okay, I feel like I need to be useful".
There are no scares here. Everything is so framed and set up scene-by-scene that only a total idiot wouldn't see the supposed jumps coming, even the slower atmospheric moments are by the numbers: oh, block our vision will you? I guess someone will be behind him when we can see again? Yup, hi there. Oh, block our vision again? That shadowy someone is gone again? Yup.
Possibly one of the best sequences involves the Bloody Mary chant at a mirror. Wow, I know this is set in 1988 but that scare is really, really old.
By all appearances this film is trying to mimic the first (random sleep-walking time lapse footage) and it tries to pull off the same shock ending, but has to magic away four characters to do the whole "alone in a house" routine.
Generally speaking film franchises are supposed to get more extreme as they go (the Saw movies got increasingly gorier, for example) but here it feels like less happens, at least in terms of scares and in terms of explaining anything. "Discover how the activity began" boasts the tagline. Really? I certainly saw things occur, but I have no idea how any of it began.
The first film had me on the edge of my seat for the last twenty minutes, the second one wasn't as successful but felt like a decent sequel, this one just feels wasted; boring cliches replacing potential story building. But then that would be suggesting these writers could write a story.
As the tagline says: Fear, revisited. REC2 maintains its predecessor's awesome atmosphere and use of found-footage technicalities.
The film begins on the very same night as the first film, minutes after the ending. A SWAT team are called in to escort a doctor through the quarantined apartment block, but little do they know at first that the doctor is actually a priest, and their mission is to find an antidote to the demonic possession that currently plagues the area.
Like all good sequels this adds to the existing story and extends the lore without overstepping its bounds. Like REC, this film is set almost entirely within the very same apartment block, even revisiting the same haunted rooms and corridors where ghastly encounters took place. This does what I love in sequels: consistency. If you enjoyed REC as much as I did (as a definitive found-footage horror film) you will enjoy this.
Naturally I don't want to spoil what happens or how it evolves the existing story, but if I had to claim something negative about the sequel, is its middle act. We follow the SWAT team early on, and this is excellent, but midway through we are given three kids who aren't connected with the story until they do what all cliche horror characters do and stick their noses where they know they shouldn't.
Another grievance is the SWAT team's total lack of professionalism... I've read excuses such as "They are Spanish, they are hot-headed", and I don't buy it. Urban warfare and tactics go out of the window in REC2, and it is inexcusable. At least in the first film they were firemen and a reporter, people who are in over their heads.
It is still as gory, intense and kinetic as the first film, though perhaps has little to improve on (REC by most standards was perfect) perhaps only by entering the action immediately, whereas REC started slowly. A worthy sequel, and I recommend anyone watching REC to follow it up with this.
Well, October 2013 starts out with a bang. This has to be the worst "found footage" "horrors" I've seen since the deplorable Quarantine.
A daughter travels to Rome to meet her mother who has been held in custody by the Vatican after murdering three people during an exorcism twenty years previous. Discovering the Vatican has no interest in helping or even acknowledging the possibility of demonic possession, the daughter takes it upon herself (and the help of her camera man and three priests) to save her mother.
Sigh... Where to begin?
There's a lot to be said about a modern horror film in the first ten seconds, if it has a disclaimer, ie: "based on a true story". But in this film's case: "The Vatican does not endorse this film".
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeally?
I'm shocked.
This only gets worse as the film continues as our characters cite some of the most cliche and most ignorant "facts" about demonology as if it were classified fact. This reminds me of wincing at Arnold Schwarzenegger's End of Days' supposed gospel (but at least that had the self-awareness as an Arnie film)
If you want to make a found footage film appear genuine and real, you have to make it credible. Our "student priests" (I'd like to call them that) take classes in the Vatican about demon possession, the Vatican hold dangerous exorcism victims in privately owned wards yet... the Vatican do not accept the existence of demon possession? They even release the mother, despite an outburst, with no safeguards for other people's well being?
Some of the dialogue is downright idiotic, from some classic "dumb camera man" syndrome (seriously what happens to men who hold cameras in these films?) to just some aggravatingly thoughtless dialogue. While possessed, the mother talks about things she couldn't possibly know to her daughter... then later the daughter is horrified when a different possessed woman knows her name. Surely that wouldn't be so surprising?
It isn't even that scary, it even fails at jump scares (a big dog randomly jumps at a fence as they walk down a random street, seriously?) I didn't think that was possible. The only credibility this film has is some decent body horror with the exorcisms. There are some alarming contortions going on which did impress. Though... I'm sure all exorcism films do this well.
It does nothing to hold your attention. The characters are bland, the story and setup is farcical and if anything it makes the mythology for real exorcisms even more laughably unlikely. There are so many better exorcism films out there, you have no reason to see this one.
An entertaining found footage film from Norway with only a handful of odd inconsistencies letting itself down.
In the same year that Monsters was released (a terrible, terrible movie) there was a little known monster movie released from Norway. Troll Hunter follows a group of three student film-makers who investigate a series of bear shootings, only to stumble upon a man whose career is to hunt and kill real trolls.
The film has all the cliches from your average found footage film, memories of Cloverfield and Blair Witch will come to mind while watching, but the film has some merit. The students are taken on a journey by the hunter, called Hans, who has had enough of his secret, Government driven job and would see it end by having footage of the trolls released. Good sense of purpose and drive for everyone involved, and especially for filming it all!
The special effects are a little dated given they weren't blockbuster budget levels, but a little suspension of disbelief can get you immersed in the fantastic world. I would say the effects improve over the course of the film, strangely; you'd think the first troll would have all the effort put into him.
However, the characters are pretty uninteresting, at least in regards to the film's lack of giving them any real personality; I didn't feel like I got to know them. They were certainly likeable (which is more than I can say for Cloverfield or Diary of the Dead...) just not very fleshed out. There were a lot of inconsistencies too, plot points given and then dropped only scenes later, its lore felt lost and some of its suspension of disbelief is hard to swallow. The man working at the electric power station never questioned why pylons exist only to be placed in a circle and not power anything? Really? (They even question this oddity in the script, but it goes nowhere)
The film's only cohesive structure is "road-trip scene, troll encounter, road-trip scene, troll encounter" repeat. This gets a little tiresome and makes a relatively short film feel long.
But it has its merits, and while I had trouble getting all of its "comedic" elements (must be a Norwegian thing) I can't say I didn't like it. Characters were nice, trolls were cool, Hans was awesome in a reclusive way, and Norway was photographed extremely elegantly at times, great landscapes. It's just that more work on making things believable would have gone a long way.
Like your monster movies? You can do worse.
