Skinwalker Ranch (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company: DeepStudios

Runtime: 80 mins

Format: Itunes

Plot: A scientific research team investigates and documents the supernatural phenomena surrounding the disappearance of a cattle rancher's 10 year-old son. Inspired by true events that shocked the paranormal community around the world.

Review: I always say in my reviews how much I love the Found Footage genre, in theory (I enjoy the concept immensely, but of course there are always some major stinkers like with every sub-genre). What I haven’t talked about though, but those who know me in real life already know quite well, is that I'm also obsessed with alien abduction and UFO movies (and the whole real-life phenomenon in general, really). There have been some great ones in my time – Fire in the Sky, Incident in Lake County, Dark Skies, and SyFy's 20 hour mini-series Taken are but a few examples of my favorites, however there have also been some major crap out there – The 4th Kind, The Forgotten, and Communion to name a few (I know that last one is a controversial opinion, but while I loved the book, I found the movie boring as shit).

Skinwalker Ranch is a real-life location I'm quite familiar with via my own researching and readings, but it's also been showcased on plenty of popular paranormal TV shows as well, so anybody who is even remotely interested in this topic probably already knows all about it, but for those who don't it's a cattle ranch and accompanying large property in Utah that seems to be the epicenter of just about every kind of supernatural activity you can think of: Ghosts and spirits, werewolves, Sasquatch, aliens and UFOs, chupacabras – you name it, this place has history with it, and a lot of it is not just word of mouth but there has been quite a lot of documented evidence for some of these things as well. I actually had no idea a movie was being made based around this location and it's weird events until last week, and I still had no idea it was due out this soon until I started seeing it listed on Itunes and other VOD services this morning, so since I love the topic and since Halloween is tomorrow, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity for a Halloween-themed night of watching what seemed to be a creepy found footage movie in Skinwalker Ranch and then posting up a review of it as a Halloween treat to all my readers!

Within the first several minutes I was surprised to see so many recognizable faces in this movie. Most of them are names you probably wouldn't know to hear them, but their faces you would automatically recognize, mostly as recurring guest spots from various TV shows. The one that stood out to me the most though was the inclusion of Erin Cahill, who I know best from the classic Time Force season of Power Rangers (one of the better seasons), as the Pink Ranger and leader of that season's team. Sadly, this kind of casting actually works against the movie. Being a Found Footage movie, it's entire gimmick rests on giving you the illusion that it's actual footage from a real event, played up even more by the unneeded opening text scrawl that explains how, where, and why this 'lost' footage was found. That entire illusion is totally undone by filling your cast with familiar faces that you can pinpoint from any number of popular TV shows and bit parts in famous movies. It also hurts that, Erin Cahill aside, the acting is surprisingly atrocious and comes across exactly as that – ACTING. Right off the bat, these two aspects completely take you out of the moment of pretty much any given scene and ruin the illusion that the movie sets out to attempt by being a Found Footage flick.

Unfortunately, even if those two aspects had been done right, the movie still wouldn't have been very good. Another 'Golden Rule' of Found Footage movies that Skinwalker Ranch not only breaks but utterly destroys, is that there's absolutely no subtlety, escalation or build-up to any of what happens here. By 15 minutes in they just dump you into the thick of the attempted-creepiness with no build-up or warning whatsoever, and thus it looses so much of its impact. And that seems to just be a hint of how this movie would continue to conduct itself during its entire runtime. There's a reason you wait all movie to see the shark in Jaws or the raptors in Jurassic Park. There's a reason that Paranormal Activity waits so long to actually start showing you some paranormal activity and then when it finally does, it's only little bits here and there, until it slowly builds up to an all-out assault on the senses for a total nerve-wracking final fifteen minutes. This movie has none of that build-up, it just drops you into the thick of it early-on and then kind of stays on that level for the next hour and a bit, without escalating the scares at all; This movie did not get the chance to be nearly as effective as it wanted to be or should have been by deciding to skip that slow build.

Another perfect example of this is during one scene you see a fully-formed ghostly figure of a boy walk by one of the cameras, with no heart-pounding build-up or subtlety about it whatsoever. In a Paranormal Activity movie you'd probably get a door slowly creaking open on its own in the background behind the character that they don't notice, and a slight shadow flicker that you may or may not have seen. Here, it's just: BAM, in your face full-bodied apparition Ghost Boy walking by the camera with no subtlety to be found. Now repeat that kind of approach for pretty much every 'scare' in the movie.

There are a few small aspects I enjoyed though, that I wish had been used in a better movie instead of wasted in this one. The research team that is the focus of the movie, I enjoyed the fact that it was made up of people from totally different professions and backgrounds, i.e. not just some ghost-hunting paranormal research group, but experts in their own various fields of study that come together to help figure out what's going on. In addition to that I also loved the inclusion of parts of this taking place during a thunder storm. It's only a small thing, but it goes a long way to adding an extra layer of atmosphere, and it's something that, oddly enough, is rarely incorporated by Found Footage movies, which considering how easy of a mood-setter thunderstorms are, you'd think they would be the go-to atmosphere device for cheap Found Footage flicks. There's also a short portion of the movie that centers around a werewolf-like beast creature, and I love me some werewolf action so suffice to say I enjoyed that part a bit (but even then, that portion was undone by the terrible cheap-looking cave system that was very obviously a quickly-made movie set and didn't look like real cave walls in any manner), and I am glad that it came back and played a part in the climax action.

Other then those things...um...well I suppose the movie, on a whole, looked nice in terms of visual style and came across very polished (I'm sure it'll really pop nicely on BluRay) and it also did a good job of keeping the motion sickness effect in check, so if that kind of thing normally bothers you than you should be fine for that with this one for the most part.

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

I've seen a lot of my peers over the last day or so praising Skinwalker Ranch up and down the wazoo, and personally I just don't understand it at all. In my eyes it's nowhere near deserving of the praise I'm seeing everywhere for it, especially when these very same people have bashed Paranormal Activity and countless other Found Footage movies that I personally think are done way better than this.

If you want a Found Footage movie that actually works hard at trying to take you out of the proper mood that it needs you in, this is the one you should check out. Otherwise, I highly recommend you give Skinwalker Ranch a skip. If you want a creepy and atmospheric Found Footage movie that will actually have your nerves doing loop-de-loops, just shoot me a message and I can recommend a good few titles that are all way better than this giant heap of a disappointment.

2/10  rooms in the Psych Ward

Read more »

V/H/S/2 (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company:  The Collective

Runtime: 93 mins

Format: Itunes

Plot: Searching for a missing student, two private investigators break into a house and find a large collection of VHS tapes. Viewing the horrific contents of each cassette, they realize there may be dark motives behind the student's disappearance.

Review: V/H/S/2 (formally titled the much better S-V/H/S) dropped last night at midnight on the Video on Demand channels and Itunes. I was hoping to stay up and watch it then, but due to time differences, 'dropped at midnight' actually meant about 4:30 am for me, soo... yeah, it kinda had to wait for the following day, plus I then wanted to wait for it to be dark out before I watched it, otherwise what would even be the point, am I right?

Anyway, V/H/S/2 starts on a similar wrap-around story as the first movie. This time around, a private Investigator and his girlfriend are hired to track down and find a missing delinquent teen and their investigation leads them to an old abandoned creepy house, which has contained within it a very large collection of old VHS tapes, of which (like the first movie) the following anthology stories are contained on. Overall this wrap-around segment was actually quite a bit better then the one in the first movie and had some nice genuinely creepy moments within it, as well as acts like an actual proper wrap-around story and doesn't just randomly end midway through the movie like the one in the first movie did. However one aspect of it really grinds my gears and annoyed me quite a bit – The teen they're looking for? Not one of the teens from the first movie's wrap-around segment like I was thinking it would be. The old creepy house he finds? Not the same one as the one in the first movie's wrap-around segment either. Despite being very similar to the first movie's, this movie's wrap-around portion is not related to the first movie's in any shape, way or form, making this movie 100% completely stand-alone and unconnected to the first movie. While I didn't like that portion of the first movie, it still would have been nice (and expected) for this movie to tie into that one in some way, preferably via the wrap-around stories, especially since this one's seems like it was initially written to do just that. Just seems like a pretty big missed opportunity to create a bit of background mythology, especially with a third movie having already been announced.

With that slight disappointment out of the way though, the first of the actual short stories deals with a man that gets a cybernetic eye to replace his lost eye, and the camera for this story comes from inside that eye. For reasons he doesn't understand, that new eye allows him to see ghosts, and he meets up with a girl who underwent the same experimental surgery to get her hearing back and likewise, it's allowed her to hear ghosts. Teamed up and trying to figure out what's going on, the two start getting assaulted by some very nasty ghosts. This story had a pretty great premise, with a few fun scenes and plenty of scares to go around. While it wasn't quite on the same level of unease as the first movie's opening segment, this one had quite a bit of jump scares to keep you on-edge. There are two aspects though that stop it from being great; The acting was distractingly bad, like SyFy Channel Original Movie of the Week level of bad, and was constantly taking me out of the moment and ruining some of the scenes that should have been way scarier then they were due to the acting. In addition, a lack of answers to pretty much anything that's going on also hurt it a bit. With some better actors and more time to fully flesh this segment out, this could have been one of the stronger stories here. As it is, it's still decent thanks to some great jump scares and creepy moments, and I was never bored or wishing it would just end already, but at the same time it's could really have benefited from some tune-ups.

Moving onto the second story, this one has a man with some kind of cam attached to his helmet as he goes for a bike ride in the woods, during which he gets bitten by a zombie and we follow around with him as he becomes a zombie himself and shambles around, attacking other people in the woods. I feel this segment thinksits being revolutionary and doing something new and unique that's never been done before (that's the vibe I get from watching it), however, this exact thing has been done countless times in dozens of homemade youtube videos and student projects that are online. And this version of it does nothing at all to set itself out from the pack and doesn't even attempt to bring anything new to the table. Chances are, even just reading this paragraph right now you can probably tell exactly how this segment plays out and can probably guess every single thing that happens in it, because it's just that generic. I find most anthology movies have an entry that you can just skip and the movie will be better off for you because of it. With the first V/H/S it was the invisible static man killer entry and for V/H/S/2, it's this one.

The middle story of this anthology is probably my top favorite of not only this bunch, but of both movies, and was brought to us by Gareth Evans, the guy who made the excellent The Raid: Redemption. A camera crew shooting a documentary is following a cult leader around on the Eve of the great 'passing over', an event that he and his followers believe will allow them to open the gates to 'Paradise' and cross over into that mythical realm. While this was easily my favorite and I could probably write a full-length review on just this segment alone, it's also the one I feel I should talk about the least just because the less you know about what happens in it, the better. This segment revels in the unexpected, and it should be watched knowing virtually nothing about it in order to get the full effect. All I'll say is that this story goes from 'normal' to 'bat shit WTF insane crazy' in about half of its runtime, and uses the other half to go from 'bat shit WTF insane crazy' to about twenty miles past that, so that by the time this segment is over you almost need to take a break and recuperate your sanity and nerves before moving on to the final story in the movie.

Which while this final story was still pretty good and I enjoyed it, its placement really should have been swapped with the previous one as I feel that would have been a muchstronger and way more impactful way to end the movie off. In this last story of the movie, we get a camera attached to a family dog while the foul-mouthed children of said family (which at times pleasantly reminded me a lot of the kids from movies like E.T., The Goonies, and Super 8, among others) play a prank on their older sister and her asshole boyfriend, which is followed by a counter-prank...at least until some white-skinned, black-eyed aliens show up to abduct everyone. There's really not much more to the plot of this one then that, and it's easily the shortest entry of the movie at only 15 minutes long, but as someone who is pretty obsessed with the whole alien/UFO/abduction phenomenon, I found this one pretty damn creepy in its own ways, and it makes me wish for more creepy horror movies to cover ground like this (such as Dark Skies, which did a decent job with a similar plot when that was released earlier this year). As I said previously though, this entry would have fitted much better if it happened earlier in the movie and the previous entry took place here, because as much as I personally liked this one and was pretty creeped out at moments, it doesn't even begin to come close to touching the previous entry, and thus it seems very confusing to me as to why they would place this one as the final short story of the movie as it's very much a one-note, simple, cookie cutter entry that, honestly, not a whole lot happens in it and it kind of just peeters out instead of ending on a bang like the last one. Then again, at only 15 minutes long, that doesn't really leave much room for many things to happen.

In my review of the first movie, I stated that one of the biggest faults for some of the individual stories was that there just wasn't enough time for the subject matter and a couple of them could have benefited greatly from a slightly longer runtime. The exact same can be said for some of these entries as well, which is made even more frustrating this time by the fact that it's a much shorter movie to boot. Granted, it has one less short story then the first movie did, but they could have used that as the perfect opportunity to fill in that missing space by extending the length of each of these stories by an extra ten minutes each (except for that stupid zombie one) instead of just shortening the overall movie's runtime. My biggest complaint about most of these stories is just that, much like with the final story of the first movie, there's just not enough time allowed for the subject matter, and just about each one could have benefited from being given slightly more screen time.

Luckily that's the only thing about the first movie that's made worse, however that mixed with the utterly confusing decision to make a very similar-but-not-connected wrap-around story, the placement of some of these stories, and that terrible zombie segment does lower my score of this one a bit. But that's ok, because unlike the first, there's plenty of score to go around here. Most of the short story segments were vastly improved from the ones in the first movie (With the exception of that zombie one, which I could have done without) making this movie an overall improvement over the first, and since it's in no way connected to it other then in name-only, you can even skip that one and just move right on to watching this much-better version of essentially the same movie. Plus, between abducting aliens, zombie viruses, killer ghosts, and Chaos Death Cults (among a few other surprises in there) there's such a wide range of horror movie topics here that pretty much everyone will find something to love.

Now if you could just take the best segments from V/H/S, and the best segments from V/H/S/2, and mix them together into their own anthology movie (and make sure they're put in an order that makes sense), then we'd have a really nice and solid horror anthology film.

7/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

Read more »