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30%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #9,031
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The infamous Odenbrook Sanitarium closed after a mass suicide occurred within its walls. Sixty years later, six college students armed with cameras and recording equipment venture into the asylum to prove the existence of the paranormal. Thrills turn into nightmares as members of the group go missing without a sound, cell phones mysteriously vanish, corridors turn into mazes, walls appear where doors once stood, flashlights fail and something or someone begins toying with the group. Days later, when five of the six friends turn up missing, the lone survivor must go through the recovered footage in order to clear his name and find out what happened to his friends.
--IMDb
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Review by Crispy
Added: February 17, 2013
We all know the drill. Movie does something fairly innovative, makes bank, and all the no-budget rip-offs start crawling out of the woodwork. In this case, we have another found footage/ghost combination thanks to Paranormal Activity.
John has awaken in a hospital, covered in cuts with his lawyer grilling him for answers. Answers about his dead friends. Answers he doesn't have. You see, back in the day, insane asylums were basically a cross between a prison and a torture chamber. Subsequently, as medical science improved, they began to shut down. Naturally, thanks to the pain endured in these locations, they're now prime ghost story fodder. And for Josh and his friends, it's the perfect spot for their final project. These six students, half of them firm believers in the paranormal and the other staunch skeptics, plan to break in to the Odenbrook Asylum, and spend the weekend recording everything, hoping to catch some proof of the ghosts' existence. Obviously, we wouldn't have a movie if said evidence didn't present itself in a big way.
Paranormal Incident plays out as Josh's interrogation. His lawyer has taken their footage and the asylum's security cameras and edited together an hour or so of the going-ons in the asylum that weekend. Oh, and they also decided to score it for some reason. Not only does it completely miss the entire point of the cinéma vérité approach, but looking at this logically, would the cops put the time and effort into putting music into something like this? I don't think that's exactly a top priority. Oh, and they included a lot of one of the guys cheating on his girlfriend for some reason. Sure, I get the fact that we had to throw some tits in there to try and salvage something, but is it really relevant to anything? Not quite. It's so obvious that these guys had no clue how to go about making a found-footage flick; they just saw the payoff and threw one together without understanding the intricacies of what actually make them work.
And then we come to that ending. Oh lord, that ending. I'm sure plenty of people are complaining that it doesn't make sense, but that's not the problem. Sure, it's not spelled out for you, but it doesn't take too much thinking to figure it out. No, the problem is that it's fucking retarded. It's so obvious that they tacked on an out-of-nowhere twist even though they didn't have one in mind, and just forced whatever they came up with last minute. Like the rest of the movie, the filmmakers knew that twist endings have worked in the past, but didn't know how or why.
So yeah, nothing going on here. Some decent tension here and there, but this is nothing but another flick trying to make a quick buck by piggybacking on a better movie. 2/10.
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