Writer(s): Nancy Leopardi
Starring: Hayley Derryberry, Tony Besson, Mike Holley, and Adam LaFramboise
Now it's time to take a slight reprieve from the onslaught of MarVista movies we've been reviewing, to check out an offering from The Asylum, essentially the “MarVista of horror” (I hope I get that quote on
one of their movie posters!). Actually, they’re probably a grade or
two lower: whereas MarVista tends to retread over their own tropes
(or the tired clichés set forth by Hallmark and Lifetime, two
channels for which they produce), The Asylum tends to directly rip
off existing horror films (and the occasional non-horror hit),
reworking them into super low-budget carbon copies in an attempt to
swindle unsuspecting folk into watching their films. Don’t believe
me? How about Snakes on a Train? Paranormal Entity?
Atlantic Rim? The only mainstream “success”—term used
very loosely—on their resume is Sharknado, the type of
off-the-wall mashup they’d been doing for years, but that just
happened to hit pop culture at just the right time.
Well here we have 100 Ghost Street: The
Return of Richard Speck, a found-footage film that is actually the
fourth in their Paranormal Entity franchise, something I did not know
until now since there’s no indication of that anywhere on the
packaging. Don’t let the lame title fool you, however, because 100
Ghost Street is every bit as lame as you were expecting.
Now, I have to be completely honest:
Any supernatural movie makes me a little nervous going in, because
there’s no reason for any of them not to be scary. I mean, if you
think about it, stalkers and killers and murderous animals and
mummies and zombies…while they can all be creepy or scary in the
right hands, they are all visible beings that can be seen and heard;
most of them also have to get in close to attack. Ghosts, on the
other hand, follow no such rules of physics, and can make their
presence known whenever they want, or however they want.
How is it, then, that ghosts are
oftentimes so dull? Here we have a subgenre with almost limitless
scare potential, and you still end up with movies like this, in which the stupidity of its characters somehow becomes
the main attraction.
The style of 100 Ghost Street is
a direct ripoff of any number of other found footage flicks, with
opening title cards informing us in advance that everyone you are
about to see has died. I’ve never really understood why this is so
prevalent in these movies: sure, Blair Witch made it work
because it was “the original”, and everyone believed it was real.
When you know it’s a work of fiction, all that forehand knowledge
does is prevent some tension for the viewer. For example, when the
final character makes it out of the house alive, we know that she
doesn’t, because the intro already told us that. Word of note to
wannabe filmmakers: The less information you give from the outset,
the better.
Anyway, the plot is very simple: Six
paranormal investigators, give or take a few, go into a house that’s
supposedly haunted by an angry ghost. It is. They die.
But movies aren’t necessarily about
what happens, but how they happen, and 100 Ghost Street
is—like most bad horror movies—a textbook example of what not
to do in this situation. Characters wander off on their own, leaving
the safety net of the entire group; the dickish “leader”—who
looks like a fifty-year-old emo singer—refuses to let a woman, who
just got attacked by a ghost(?) leave; a character is forced to go
into a known danger zone (complete with freshly-ripped body) alone
just to recover some keys that may or may not matter; the list really
goes on and on. My initial hesitation melted away after the first
thirty minutes, when I realized just how little this movie cared
about entertaining its own audience, and was replaced with a kind of
indifferent boredom.
It’s not completely without merit,
though it’s certainly without the kind that makes it worthy of a
watch: some of the ghost effects are actually pretty well done.
Unfortunately, most of the good effects are wasted on a scene in
which a woman (the one who was attacked by a ghost earlier, then
is—surprise!—left entirely alone less than an hour later) is
raped by an entity. Now, actually, having a character raped by a
“ghost” isn't a new idea; after all, there was a movie based
entirely around that idea (1981's The Entity, starring Barbara
Hershey as the victim). But in the hands of The Asylum, the whole
scene just puts the “icky” in “gimmicky”.
Of course, Asylum movies literally do
exist solely as a cash grab to leech off the success of
already-existing movies, so any attacks you make on the film’s
quality or similarities to other works, are only part of their draw.
It also, in a way, puts them above critique: they don’t care what
you think about anything in their library, because they already have
your money and wasted your time; that, in the end, is clearly all
that matters.
So with that in mind, I’ll just say
100 Ghost Street is exactly what you think it is going into
it: a lifeless supernatural found-footage “thriller” with very
little in the way of thrills, and absolutely nothing in the way of
intelligence.
RATING: 2.5/10
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