PARANORMAL XPERIENCE

Medical student Angela accepts her professor's challenge to demonstrate the existence of paranormal phenomena. Thus, to confirm her thesis, according to which everything depends on suggestion, the girl decides to go with her five classmates to Susurro, an abandoned mining town where terrible bloodshed occurred in the past, and document everything with a video camera. In Susurro, in fact, Dr. Matarga, the local doctor, enjoyed torturing and killing his patients until the villagers rebelled and locked him to die in the salt mines that run through the town's underground. The doctor was never found, and it is said that in the town it is still possible to see his ghost. Angela also involves her younger sister Diana in the adventure, who should transport the group with her van. Upon arriving in Susurro, the trouble begins, and Diana sees Dr. Matarga lurking menacingly through the corridors of her home. Two magic words in the title of this slasher from Spain: "paranormal" and "3D". The first cleverly recalls the well-known and successful "Paranormal Activity", to which the poster also refers, the second denotes the use of modern stereoscopy, which is now present in 2 out of 3 films. In short, the business card of "Paranormal Xperience 3D" sounds a lot like a lure and does not bode well for the most attentive. And then, in fact, when you go to watch the movie, you realize you were not wrong. "Paranormal Xperience 3D" is an innocuous little film like a spring drizzle, an out-of-time product, even for the '90s... and this time it is not a matter of a nostalgia operation or a vintage citational enterprise, but of a film conceived without real understanding of cause, as if the producers had fished blindly in the "scripts" drawer pulling out an old dusty script that until now no one had wanted to realize. That said, "Paranormal Xperience 3D" is not a bad movie, but it is annoyingly anachronistic, useless in its imitation of the American slasher model without ideas or novelties, relying only on the fact of being the first Spanish horror in 3D. The good thing is that even the 3D of this film is used with an old conception of stereoscopy, almost completely nullifying the depth effect to focus from time to time on the relief of objects that pop out of the screen. Objects that can be pics for lobotomy, visual effects to simulate hypnosis, hands that grab the audience, splashes of blood or severed fingers. In short, a playful use of 3D that, on the one hand, entertains because it is paradoxically different from the usual, and on the other, shows all the limits of a poor and minimal use of this technology. For the rest, there is everything you could expect from a slasher: good-looking guys and girls ready to serve as cannon fodder, a masked killer who kills in the most inventive ways, and an inhospitable place from which there seems to be no escape. In any case, the prurient component is strangely missing, which, except for a very chaste sex scene at the beginning, offers only a prolonged close-up of the backside of Ursula Corberó. The good points are the murders, all quite inventive and sufficiently bloody, as modern times require. Despite the short duration of the film (only 80 minutes), "Paranormal Xperience 3D" takes too long to get to the heart of the matter, with about 40 minutes of nothing at all, just a lot of chatter that leads nowhere. By the halfway point of the film, something starts to happen, and around the fiftieth minute, there is the first victim. If we then consider that the plot is highly predictable, there is no tension, and there is practically no real surprise at the end, one feels also a bit neglected by a hastily written script. Some good directorial intuition on the part of young Sergi Vizcaíno, who on more than one occasion demonstrates knowing where to place the camera, more for a correct aesthetic rendering than to generate suspense. A mediocre and negligible slasher, therefore, which is almost strange to see programmed in cinemas. If it were not for the 3D, I bet "Paranormal Xperience" would have been rightly relegated to home video distribution only. Only for die-hard American-style slasher fans. Add half a pumpkin.