Meadhall of the Comitatus

Someone’s been paying attention to their cable guide! I don’t know when exactly it started, but at some point in the last, err, I’m gonna go with 5 years there’s been a proliferation of “paranormal research” type shows, and often during prime time slots. Clearly people are watching these, say what you will about them. Does that mean that you can make an interesting movie about it? Well . . . no.

"If there's anything interesting going on in this movie, please speak into this recorder. If there's a plot, please show yourself."

Premise: 2/5

Murders not unlike those we’ve seen in The Amityville Horror took place in a house twenty years ago, and the heir to the family killed there hires a ghost hunter to find out if claims that the house is haunted are true. He also hires an annoying journalist and a video guy to go in the house with her to record everything. Then it’s a bit like a cross between The Blair Witch Project and one of those ghost-hunting shows, only it’s extra boring and draggy.

I will say that, as someone who’s been interested in this kind of stuff since I was a kid, at least they were pretty accurate in terms of what the research and hunting is like, so the movie wasn’t just a cashing-in on the weird growth in popularity of ghost hunting. They at least did their research, which is oh so much more than I can say about enough movies I’ve reviewed in the past, so I give it a gold star for that. The biggest problems the movie has are that it’s far too long at an hour fifty, you already know that everyone ends up dead from the title alone, and the big “twist” in the plot that comes in the last fifteen minutes (of EXPOSITION, for fuck’s sake) of the movie was plainly obvious to anyone from the first fifteen. That’s a lot of time to do nothing at all.

These are the journalist's boobs, and also the part in the movie where she's at her least annoying. Coolio would approve.

Cast: 1.5/5

The “psychics” on any one of the cable TV ghost hunting shows are a thousand times better actors than any one of the supporting cast in this movie. Mike Marsh plays the video guy Colin (he is also one of the writers and exec producers) and is bland at best, really bad at the worst. His “acting” doesn’t change at all: he reacts the same way to a chair mysteriously moving across the room on its own as he does to smoking a cigarette, no different when he’s getting pushed over by a ghost than when he cuts his hand open on an exposed nail. Hell, he can’t even be bothered to act different when he’s high from slipping out and smoking pot than when he’s explaining how night vision cameras work. Also, when he’s behind the camera filming the investigation, he sounds like Jason from Home Movies only without the entertainment value.

Mike Marsh working on his best Nicolas Cage impression.

Still, he may not be a good actor, but at least he’s not as truly terrible as the other two supporting characters: Yvette the annoying journalist chica (Davina Joy) and the beyond-bad Mary Young (played by Lindsay Page), the spooky religious fundy that no one was expecting but showed up anyways. These two–just argh. Yvette’s role involves her walking around in silk pajamas often while asking irritating questions in an irritating Rosie Perez manner. Occasionally she gets to crack a joke, which is about as good and has the same effect as 95% of Colin Quinn’s Tough Crowd schtick. “C’mon, NOTHIN’?” Mary Young is an allegedly creepy girl whose only reaction to anything is a sneer of disdain and a rolling of the eyes while she calls the ghost hunters godless and says nice stuff to them like, “It’s too bad your mother didn’t kill you when you were a baby.” Oh, but she’s also good at looking vapid and sleepy whenever she’s not doing that, lest I forget her other “talent.”

These losers would’ve earned the cast rating a .5 from me if it was just them, but for some reason I like the head investigator, Carter Simms (played by Patti Tindall). She acts like a professional in the role, and she’s also the only one who I’d call a professional actor in the whole cast. For one thing, she knows her lines and knows how to deliver them, much more than I can say for everyone else, and she does a good job giving her character the aura of authority that she’s supposed to have for the plot to work. Again, much more than I can say for anyone else here.

Why does no one love the spiteful bitter girl?

Technical: 2/5

Let me say this right away: the sound editor should be locked in a room with this movie on full blast so he has to deal with this crap too. It’s all over the volume bar! One second the characters can be having a normal conversation, then the sound gets so low you have to crank it up to hear, and then right after that it comes back in SUPER FREAKING LOUD and nearly deafens you. You might think this is an effect, or some attempt at building atmosphere (like the execrable The Strangers one trick pony). It’s not even that, though, because the wildest fluctuations in volume occur when NOTHING scary is even supposed to be happening. It’s like someone just had a seizure on the soundboard and left it in the final cut.

The camera work is pretty utilitarian, nothing flashy or special there. It could be because of the pseudo-documentary feel the movie’s going for, or it could be because the camera crew just isn’t that good. But ehh, either way it’s fine. I’d rather someone not try too hard to dazzle us with cinematography than try to be flashy and epic fail (I’m looking at you, The Hunger). There’s not a lot of gore in this movie, and what little there is is fairly pedestrian and not worth going into. The superimposed effect they use when they show us one of these ghosts caught on film is OK I guess, but it’s a little too clearly defined–if they wanted to sell us on the ghost hunting TV show dimension more, they would’ve put a bit less polish on those effects, or roughened it up some and left more to the imagination. Still, nothing I can hate on too much.

But seriously, fuck that sound guy.

zOMG spoiler! This is a rip-off of "The Sixth Sense" recurring door theme. Only not good and waaay too long. Like this movie!

Popcorn Factor: 1.5/5

The plot is half-interesting, and I like that they tried to stay true to the “hard” paranormal investigation stuff (no proton packs or anything like that, just IR cameras, EVPs, and EMF detectors). However, the movie’s really not scary, it goes on forever, and has too many failures in acting and tech to really be worth a recommendation. You’d do better watching one of these cable TV shows and saving yourself the extra fifty minutes to do something interesting or fun with.

And seriously. Fuck that sound guy.