GRAVE ENCOUNTERS

Lance Preston is the face of ESP - Paranormal Phenomena, a successful television show that aims to make the viewer the protagonist of paranormal experiences. To do this, Lance and his collaborators go to places notoriously haunted by paranormal presences and document everything through their cameras. For the fourth episode of ESP, Lance and his team go to the old psychiatric hospital of Collingwood, abandoned for years and the scene in the past of atrocious deaths. The daring journalists have themselves locked in the hospital for an entire night, only the custodian will go to remove the padlocks the next morning. When in 1999 "The Blair Witch Project" debuted in cinemas around the world with a publicity campaign to make any current Michael Bay film envious, many were disappointed, cried foul, to the media hoax of those who had wanted to pass off dry manure for a delicious chocolate filled with coffee cream. "The Blair Witch Project" may or may not be liked, but at the time it was undoubtedly a film that took people by surprise, left them disoriented, but with hindsight even its most ardent detractors must admit the innovative impact and the importance it represented for the horror genre. In fact, 12 years later, people continue to replicate, imitate, and cite the work of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who, although they did not invent it, brought the language of the mockumentary to notoriety. Today, the Vicious Brothers (Stuart and Colin Vicious by birth name) propose precisely a film in the style of Blair Witch, with the due similarities to "[REC]" (or "Quarantine", given the nationality of the work) and the update on times with a massive use of visual effects. The result is "ESP - Paranormal Phenomena" ("Grave Encounters" in the original), a mockumentary that starts from the device of "found footage" (i.e., found footage) to bring to the screen a horror film without too many frills, that goes straight to the point and presents itself as a horror spectacle full of scares, monsters, and special effects. Seen from this point of view, "ESP - Paranormal Phenomena" can undoubtedly be a pleasant exponent of its genre, in that it aims to eliminate dead times and minimalism of famous exponents, such as the already cited "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity", betting on pure spectacle. However, in doing so, all the hypothetical pretensions of realism that products of this kind can have go to waste, so much so that in a film like "ESP" asking the viewer to believe that what is shown on the screen is the report of actually occurred events is something really hard, if not impossible. But the Vicious Brothers apparently do not care about realism and perhaps they get carried away too much, falling into a pair of scenes in excess of "kitsch". Precisely because of this propensity for excess and easy scares "ESP" entertains, appears as a game in which the viewer is asked to participate. Therefore, ghosts that suddenly distort the features of their face, words carved in blood on the bodies of the protagonists, arms that sprout from nowhere and blood, precisely what one would expect from an American ghost movie but not from a mockumentary. Beyond some particularly well-aimed scenes that feature furious ghosts and bathtubs full of blood, what strikes about "ESP" is the will and success in making the location the protagonist of the story, that is, the Collingwood hospital. The hospital is alive, there's no getting around it, it changes shape, disorients, and induces madness by transforming into a real surreal prison with infinite corridors, walls that sprout from nowhere, and exits that turn into entrances. Part of the success of this film lies precisely in the well-chosen location and its enhancement. There are things in "ESP" that however do not satisfy as much, starting with a reality TV style that sometimes seems even wrong. At some points, such as the beginning where the found footage is introduced with an interview, the shaky camera and zooms used without criterion are not at all justified and the same thing happens later, always during interviews before the protagonists have themselves locked in the hospital. That is, in cases like those, where someone is interviewed who is still in front of the lens, in general a tripod is used and certainly the zoom is not manipulated to make the editor's job difficult. But this the Vicious seem not to know and they place simulations of handheld camera and rough movements even where they are not needed. The ending of the film also leaves something to be desired...and by ending I mean precisely the closure, with a climax continuously announced and always postponed that when it actually arrives seems then too brief and unemphatic. "ESP" is disposable cinema, it will certainly not be remembered in the future, but in the here and now it entertains, knows how to entertain, and proposes itself as a different look at the mockumentary genre, more oriented towards pure genre, without dead times and rhythm drops. And in a genre today inflated like this it is already a good merit. Remove half a pumpkin from the final vote.