3 /10

Warning: Spoilers

The concept is great: two rival paranormal investigation teams--one made of skeptics producing a "Ghost Hunters" type television series, the other made of religious zealot "true believers"--are teamed up to determine whether there is really an afterlife by investigating a haunted, abandoned mental hospital. The concept is solid, and it should have made for a really great film.



"Should have." Unfortunately, it missed the mark for a number of reasons.



The main reason is the script, which starts out promising then lurches headlong into a "Praise Pictures" production with cheesy, overt, ham-fisted religious proselytizing. The characters are terribly inconsistent; Jack, the leader of the "Paranormal Inspectors" skeptic team, only seems like a skeptic during the first eight minutes of the show. In fact, everyone on the "skeptic" team seems to be "all in" on the idea that their devices actually detect ghosts, which is a bit strange, given that as the skeptics, they aren't supposed to believe in ghosts. (That IS what makes them "skeptics", right?) Oh . . . and there's a random Scotsman. For no reason whatsoever.



I've seen worse writing, and some of the scenes are quite good, especially at the beginning. On the other hand, there are scenes that simply make no sense. The same is true of the dialog: sometimes it's great, but at other times it induces the kind of eye rolling that may require an optometrist to sort out. (And why does everyone push everyone in this film? It seems like every thirty seconds, someone has to push someone else in the shoulder.)



The film is also put together inconsistently, jumping from a first-person "found footage" kind of documentary style to interviews to a traditional third-person horror-movie perspective without warning and without any apparent reason. Honestly: random shots of the ghost nurse crawling around the hospital (seemingly lifted from any number of Japanese horror films from the last decade) add nothing to the plot, and if anything, reduce some of the suspense. (And we don't need a five-minute aerial footage shot; we get it: they went to a different location.) The "found footage" segments frequently have a musical score underneath, which makes sense in the context of this being a television show . . . but doesn't make sense given the premise that this is footage from an episode that never had any production beyond the initial shooting of footage.



The acting is just as inconsistent as the writing and production styles. The best performances are by the supporting actors: Natalie Wetta stands out as skeptic-but-not-skeptic "Andi", Chris Perry's performance as "Damon" is as good as you could hope for given what he has to work with, and Robert Maisonett makes "Jose" a fun, likable character. Unfortunately, Keithen Hergott's acting is atrocious; his "Dylan" marches woodenly all the way through. Josh Folan does slightly better as "Jack", but the longer the movie progresses, the worse his performance gets. In the end, though, it's hard to lay the blame for these performances on anyone but the writers and producers. Sure, some of the acting is cheesy, but having appeared in a number of low-budget films myself--often with very talented actors--I realize it's unfair to pin all of that on the actors who, after all, are told what lines to deliver and how to deliver them. You can hardly blame them if they didn't spin straw into gold.



The sets in this film are unbelievable, and I don't mean that as a compliment. For a hospital that has been closed for decades, it seems to have a lot of expensive (and modern) equipment--gurneys, beds, and wheelchairs among other things--littering the halls. The offices also seem to have a lot of half-finished paperwork on the desks. (I would think that when a hospital is closed, they tend to let people finish the Johnson report before the doors are locked.) The whole place is also amazingly devoid of dust and insects (except bees; at least there are bees) and rodents . . . but at least the electricity is still on. (WHAT?)



That's not to say the film is all bad. The cinematography is much better than I expected from a low-budget flick and--with a few exceptions--the special effects do stand out in this film. Unfortunately, a lot of them are unnecessary to the plot (such as the aforementioned random shots of the ghost nurse ambling through the hallways).



If this film was--as I presumed when I first watched it--a student film for a film school final project, I would have called it a good effort, given the limitations of student films. Sadly, it was not a student film, and while it was a low-budget film, the biggest problems with this film--the bad dialog, the inconsistent characters, and the obnoxiously preachy religious tone that builds to a deafening crescendo at the end--have nothing to do with the budget.



Hopefully, someone will take this same concept and make another film . . . and maybe this new film will be the film "Episode 50" should have been.