Film Review: PARANORMAL ASYLUM: THE REVENGE OF TYPHOID MARY (2013)

Found footage horror doesn’t get much worse than Paranormal Asylum: The Revenge of Typhoid Mary (2013).  Two film makers on their last effort to do something with their careers decide to do a documentary on the legendary Typhoid Mary.  As their investigation delves deeper and they come across more people that seem to be connected to Mary who spent time in an asylum and was subject to psychotropic drugs, their own sanity seems to falter as reality seems to slowly drift away. 

Written by Fred Edison there isn’t much in this film that hasn’t been done in other found footage films only this film is more overt by giving glows and halos to people and having the video footage flicker constantly.  This all actually takes you out of the “reality” of the film (the opposite affect mind you that these style films should thrive for).  The film also suffers from subpar acting that you never believe come from real people but just bad actors.  This is actually really common with found footage indie films that believe that inexperienced and young actors can carry a film.  What these films actually require are the best actors that can act like “real” people.

The biggest travesty of the film is the uninteresting characters that can’t carry the film which is what a found footage film desperately needs.  As directed by Nimrod Zalmanowitz the film suffers from relying too much on the “jump scare” rather than creating a truly creepy atmosphere, so, it plays for the lowest common denominator and will only appeal to that (small) audience. 

There are plenty of better films out there that you can spend time with rather than this dud.

Film Review: 7 NIGHTS OF DARKNESS (2011)

Six strangers are tasked with spending the next seven nights in a supposedly haunted abandoned asylum with a nefarious history.  This is the premise behind 7 Nights of Darkness (2011).    Compromised of footage the contestants are supposed to be filming each night, the film is a mixture of found footage and regular cinematic techniques as it decides when and when it doesn’t want to adhere to the “found footage” aesthetic in order to “cheat” and get a better angle. 

Each day the six contestants are given a task that they have to fulfill in order to proceed to the next day.  Each successful day brings them one step closer to winning $7 million that will be split among the people who manage to stay till the end of the week.  Despite being locked up in the asylum and given only a single task during the entire day, most of the contestants spend their time playing cards and doing relatively nothing.  All the contestants are strangers from different states with different backgrounds and they have little in common with one another.

Whereas most films of this kind would revel at the chance to explore the location and see what is going on none of these characters are really interested (except for one who is quickly the first person to meet a paranormal fate) and therefore the audience is never really interested.  The film is comprised of uninteresting characters with little to no motivation other than to get rich.  There is no real drive in the characters or the film and even when “spooky” stuff starts to happen the film decides to fall into the tired old trope of having stupid characters do stupid things.

Written & directed by Allen Kellogg the plot is lazy and the direction is uninspired and uninteresting.  There is nothing in the film that hasn’t been done a thousand times before in other mediocre and poor found footage paranormal films.

Film Review: GREYSTONE PARK (2012)

I know I’ve said a lot about found footage films in the last year but unfortunately there are a ton of them being made every year with no signs of them disappearing any time soon.  And unfortunately, most of them are rarely any good which brings me to Greystone Park (2012) which is yet another film in a line of films about a crew of film makers entering into an abandoned hospital in which things ultimately go wrong. 

I won’t bother you with the details of this film as you have already seen it before and done better (Grave Encounters is just a more recent one done infinitely better) but I am wondering why film makers, especially indie film makers, can’t seem to come up with a better location in which to set their found footage film instead of an abandoned mental hospital.  So many of them fail to bring anything new to offer audiences so why not just change the venue?  A haunted house or a haunted graveyard, I’d even go for an abandoned village but a mental hospital has been done to death just within the last three to five years.

I love the found footage sub genre of horror and when done correctly you get some truly interesting films like The Last Exorcism (2010), Grave Encounters (2011), The Bay (2012), Paranormal Activity (2007), Cloverfield (2008), Troll Hunter (2010) or Apollo 18 (2011), to name a few.  Now they don’t all appeal to all audiences (Grave Encounters and Apollo 18 are a guilty pleasure) but each of these films strives to bring something new to the story that they are telling which hasn’t been done before.

Greystone Park and its recent brethren are carbon copies of one another that offer very little both in terms of story and character.  Maybe it would’ve been more effective if it’d just thrown out the found footage and “film maker” characters and just told a good story.  The last great mental hospital film was Session 9 (2001), which looked like a found footage film in style and mood without the contrivances of the found footage genre.