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Monday, June 3, 2019

ASININE ASYLUM: 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012)

Director: Martin Wichmann Andersen
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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