Culture Crypt
Review:
A ganzfeld experiment is a technique that uses sensory deprivation to test participants for ESP or telepathic abilities. “The Ganzfeld Haunting” is a movie that uses sensory deprivation to test if a viewer’s eyes, ears, and brain can still function after being repeatedly dulled for 82 minutes.
The visual attack is led by pointless camera shots of arbitrary things like water dripping off a soap dish or unmotivated focus racks between a girl’s face and droplets on a shower door. The aural assault comes by way of nonsensical babbling from ghostly narration or impossibly annoying dialogue where every poorly written sentence is padded with a half-dozen f-bombs.
Four college students assemble in an abandoned house that is supposed to be creepy because random swaths of wallpaper are torn into dangling strips and innumerable holes are punched into every wall. For a class project, their plan is some ridiculousness about wearing noise-cancelling headphones and goofy goggles to see if thinking really hard can psychically transmit images into another person’s mind. Or whatever qualifies as a mind for these brainless borefests. Mentioning anything more about the plot would be useless since the script cares less than anyone about it. “The Ganzfeld Haunting” is so interested in showing nostrils hoovering up cocaine like it is backstage at Lollapalooza that anything remotely approaching actual character development is sucked into the same drug-induced haze of senselessness.
A short ways into “The Ganzfeld Haunting,” I planned on taking a screenshot of every time someone snorted a line of coke to illustrate how ridiculously excessive the instances are. Before the movie had a chance to reach its midpoint, I realized that doing so would take countless hours, and enough time was already wasted by an empty experience. Had I gone through with the idea, I would have ended up with enough still images to recreate virtually the entire film in flipbook form.
Incredibly, three names are credited for drafting the screenplay. It is a hysterical notion that any one writer needed two more people to collaborate on the creation of scenes summarized by the simple description, “Generic Character A sticks a rolled bill in his/her nose and inhales a mound of blow… again.”
Softcore scenes of Rumer Willis and Taylor Cole tease a lesbian romance for no purpose other than excusing a purely panty-clad back half of the runtime in hopes that male viewers might dislike the movie less. Sadly, this shameless sex appeal is the only tolerable distraction in an otherwise unnoticeable mess of a movie. Now a turned-on audience can feel as embarrassed as the actors about being fooled into “The Ganzfeld Haunting.”
More interesting than the movie’s fictional story is whatever behind-the-scenes blackmail took place to pool Willis, Cole, Billy Zane, Dominic Purcell, and other recognizable names into a project that is guaranteed to remain unlisted on the back of everyone’s headshot. Flashes of static-filled imagery with no meaningful context constitute the movie’s idea of how to convey horror. Blood-dripping faucets and randomly slamming doors pass for shallow scares. Irredeemable as art and as entertainment, “The Ganzfeld Haunting” is an insultingly disastrous way to spend an hour and a half, and a dangerous way to dumb down one’s own senses.
Horror Movie a Day
The Ganzfeld Haunting (2014)
FEBRUARY 11, 2014
Before Moviepass changed their program, it was pretty easy to find surprise theatrical releases like The Ganzfeld Haunting
through their service; their website would list all currently playing
movies in your area, sorted by popularity - you just had to go to the
last page and work your way back to find these "gems". And of course,
by "gems" I mean they were almost all awful (Lost Coast Tapes and Amber Alert
were found this way, if memory serves), so it hasn't exactly been a big
loss that the app ONLY shows you the popular movies now. To find stuff
like this, you gotta go theater by theater and look, which is more
trouble than it's worth. But I was stumbling around on the theater's
website for a different reason, and came across this thing - a
theatrical horror movie starring Billy Zane, Dominic Purcell, and the
gorgeous Taylor Cole? SIGN ME UP!
And as a bonus, it actually sounded kind of interesting. In fact, I'll paste the synopsis I read below:
"Trying
to prove the possibility of psychic communication, a group of
hard-partying psychology students mistakenly unearth a grisly series of
murders from their forgotten youth. As ghosts from the past become
increasingly violent, the students must solve a 20-year-old crime before
they are driven insane - or become murder victims themselves."
Sounds
pretty good, right? I figured Zane (or Purcell) played their professor
or something, and it would have some of the cool scientific-based
horror that I enjoyed in The Stone Tapes or The Apparition
(neither of which are perfect movies, mind you - but belong to a
sub-genre I wish had more entries). Alas, while that plot synopsis
wasn't exactly WRONG, the movie focuses almost exclusively on the "hard
partying psych students" aspect - I would estimate nearly half of the
film is nothing but one of the four snorting coke, drinking hard liquor
from a bottle, smoking a joint, or "letting themselves go", i.e. fooling
around at random with one of their fellow students (including a brief
lesbian encounter between Cole and Rumer Willis). Maybe another 10% or
so is just them yelling at each other. The epilogue, where Purcell
finally shows up (as a cop, along with Hoyt McCallany), adds another 5
minutes or so where they just wander around the house saying "Look",
pointing at a drug or a bloody weapon, and muttering "What the fuck...".
I'm not going to
do the math, but that doesn't leave a hell of a lot of the 85 minute
movie for anything involving "increasingly violent ghosts", and no one
seems particularly interested in solving any crime (including the
cops!). Willis literally spends the entire movie either snorting coke
or wandering in and out of the room where the others are, never taking
an active role in the experiment or even SAYING anything much of value
beyond "What the fuck was that?" or similarly brief, often profane
outbursts (what little enjoyment I got out of the movie, besides
appreciating Cole, was from imagining Rumer's dad having to sit through
this fucking thing). As for the backstory that provides the "mystery",
it's completely incoherent - Cole realizes that she is one of the little
girls seen in the fragmented flashbacks that pop up whenever they try
the experiment (which is a real life theory involving projecting
thoughts into another person), but it's not until the end credits that
it becomes perfectly clear that all FOUR of them knew each other as
children and were witnesses (I guess?) to a murder committed by Billy
Zane.
I actually
felt bad for Zane. The guy co-starred in one of the biggest films of
all time, and both of his co-stars are currently starring in Oscar fare
(Leo's being more successful than Kate's) while he shows up in awful
horror movies that get single screen releases a week before they hit
Blu-ray. His character is a total cipher; he takes home movies
(molestation might be an issue, it's too jumbled to know for sure), says
nonsensical things while looking out of a window, and plays War with
one of his daughters. He's not really in any full SCENES, just
scattered shots, and I don't even think his character was given a name.
I mean, every single person on screen in this thing deserves better,
but Zane in particular could really use a hug for his trouble.
However,
it's possible that he was in it more originally. I mean, I'm not
surprised that his role was brief, because that's how these things go - a
few names are used to get the movie sold, but their screentime is
brief. It's just the WAY his role plays out leads me to think that
there was more to it; the same way you could tell Donald Pleasence's
screentime had clearly been chopped up/reduced in the theatrical version
of Halloween 6. And I thought this long before the end credits
popped up and listed not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR editors!
I read a lot of credits (it's my job!) and I swear, I have never once
seen a film with more than 3 credited editors (not counting assistants
and such), and the ones I have tend to be giant blockbusters, not random
low budget horror films. It also starts in a very jarring manner; the
four of them arrive at the house to start an experiment we know almost
nothing about (and never really learn) and almost instantly start
bickering and talking as if we had already known these people for 20
minutes. There's also a timestamp motif (the movie takes place over 24
hrs) that starts off telling us every hour (6 am, 7 am, 8 am), and then
stops until 1 am - another sign of a jumbled up, re-edited mess.
And
it's a shame, because there IS a good movie to be made from this
concept. They are supposed to go to a neutral place to ensure that any
flashes or images they get won't be of their own memories of the place,
and they fuck that up (Cole's character says her family owns the house
but she has supposedly never been there), but I can buy that contrivance
(the fact that they have apparently ALL been there and were friends as
kids is too ridiculous to even begin to critique, however) if it was
serving a scientific-based approach to the usual "long buried memories
of a tragedy resurface" plot. The ghost element is rather interesting
too; the girl appears more or less in the same spot and doing the same
thing every time, which obviously limits its use but is kind of cool in
its own way (I'm sure it's not the first example of a ghost being stuck
in a loop of sorts, but it's certainly not OVERused), though it's pretty
benevolent - why couldn't Zane's ghost be around as well? Or is he
even dead? Ah, who knows.
Hilariously, nearly all of the problems were the same ones I had with The Traveler,
which was also directed by Michael Oblowitz (something I just learned 5
seconds ago). Like that movie, which also featured an actor who is
REALLY slumming it (Zane here, Val Kilmer there), the plot was obtuse
and repetitive, the ending was baffling (one of the four just wanders
out of the movie, I guess), and it featured horribly misguided music
choices (some angry loud guitar stuff in Traveler; here we get
some Skrillex type shit performed by someone who obviously hates
humanity). At first I thought maybe this was one of those deals where a
filmmaker got a movie taken away from him by producers and would give
him the benefit of the doubt, but when he has two different films that
suffer from the exact same problems, I have no choice but to believe
that maybe he's just not a very good filmmaker (he's also behind The Foreigner,
one of the worst Seagal films I've seen, which is saying something). I
won't forget his name again - it will serve as a warning that not even
Moviepass should be paying to see this guy's nonsense.
What say you?
P.S.
The movie got a little bit of press last week when Corey Feldman
inexplicably showed up at the premiere pretending to be a journalist,
hoping to get mock interviews with Zane and Willis for some online TV
show he has. But neither of them showed up. That anecdote is far more
interesting and entertaining than the movie, I assure you.
Full Movie on PutLocker
No comments:
Post a Comment