Paranormal State – Season
Four (2009 – 2010/A&E DVD Set)
+ The Blair Witch Project
(1999/Lionsgate Blu-ray) + 7 Days
(2010/IFC/MPI DVD)
Picture: C/D/C
Sound: C+/C/C+ Extras: D Main Programs: C/D/D
How badly have the Horror and Supernatural Thriller genres
fallen? They have bottomed out so badly
that they represent the epitome of everything that is wrong with Hollywood and media
today. We now offer three examples of
that bottom with one TV show and two feature-length disasters that epitomize
the era.
A&E has always offered quality programming and there
was a time when they were compared to PBS, but shows like Paranormal State have ended that analogy, featuring the “real life”
Paranormal Research Society (PRS) trying to explain various phenomena. This boring Season Four is worse than I could have ever gathered by watching
just a few shows. 12 shows are here on 2
DVDs (meant to fill half-hour slots, so even they know when to quit) and I
never bought any of it, even when some of the people on screen seemed to
be. Ryan Buell runs this weekly fiasco
and I am no big fan, but it is another “reality TV” show with no reality to it,
catering to the lowest common denominator without admitting it.
Junk like this and its theatrical film and cable
counterparts were all promoted by the quick money of a feature that ripped off
(more than you could imagine) an indie production about the murderous Jersey
Devil on the loose. Originally released
by the now-defunct Artisan, The Blair
Witch Project (1999) made a small mint with next to no budget and sent the
bad message to filmmakers big and small that all you need is a cynical
exploitation shtick to make money and who cares what you release; something
that finally caught up with the studios in the Summer of 2010 along with the
bad side of the 3-D movement.
It had two directors (which is a bad thing 99% of the
time) in Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, neither of whom have done anything
watchable since, as found footage shows what might have happened to a group out
in the woods. It is so bad, you land up
rooting for the killer… any killer… ghosts, witches, demons, bears, aliens from
outer space, serial killers, Yogi Bear and Boo Boo?
So a bunch of people got suckered and we have all paid the
price. The film did have its own curse,
besides all involved never moving on to anything good or noteworthy, Artisan
spend a fortune on a stupid sequel and it crippled the studio so badly when it
bombed spectacularly (the studio somehow talked themselves into believing they
had a franchise when they did not) that they eventually were merged into
Lionsgate and out of existence.
But the bad influence stuck and led in part to the
“torture porn” cycle led by the Saw
films and Hostel films. The exploitation threw out the supernatural
aspects for outright body mutilation (which is so bad that it is likely fueling
more of the real life version; just what the FBI needed) and has led to a spate
of unnecessary remakes of almost every major Horror film, the worst of which
was Universal’s low-life remake of Last
House On The Left, bombing in the middle of the worst run of money-losers
in the studio’s history and pointing out the bad judgment that created that
situation. Daniel Grou’s French film 7 Days (2010) tries to be the same
film, but (through Patrick Senécal’s extremely inept screenplay) tries to make
smart and profound material that cannot ever work that way.
In both, a doctor and family man with a daughter see their
daughter disappear and find out that they were raped, tortured, mutilated… fill
in the blanks, so the “good father” decides to seek revenge in his own
way. Unlike Universal’s catastrophe, the
daughter here is much younger and is murdered, as if that would justify a round
of the father capturing, torturing and destroying the man responsible. Now the reactionary response would be how he
is immoral and that does not help anything, but the genre (when it is not
garbage) throws morality out the window, but there is a limit to where it can
do this before a film collapses on itself.
Here (as in the House
remake), the films cannot decide whether the father retains his dignity and
decency after doing what he does to men we do find out are guilty. They also don’t care, as long as you are
shocked and you keep watching, which they do in the most condescending, cynical
and debasing way, as if the audience were total idiots. And both films are very gruesome with no
point, so that is all the more admission to what hack jobs they are.
If the father is bad, then the morality collapses, but
then so does the point of watching and it is no “Noir” either, that is just a
cop out by cinematic illiterates. If you
root for the father, you too are made to be an idiot and there is an almost
fascististic celebration of death here that is really the end of another cycle,
the 1980s tough guy action films.
All in all, these are all embarrassing, but likely not the
end of the hyper-schlock ahead. At least
you can trace back to these works and works like it when things went
rotten. Avoid them all!
The letterboxed 1.78 X 1 image on State is weak, not aided by the bad monochrome (and supposedly
“night vision” shooting) that is tired, clichéd and might as well come from a
1947 black and white analog TV. Even
poorer is the 1080p 1.33 X 1 image on Witch
is not only easily the worst 1.33 X 1 Blu-ray we have ever seen or will ever
see, but it is simply one of the very worst images the Blu-ray format will ever
possess. High Definition really shows
just what a cheap, cheesy, bad shoot this mess really is and how the late Neal
Fredericks simply ruined the look of the Horror and Supernatural genre for
years and possibly decades to come. The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Days
is also soft, gutted and despite being shot in 35mm film (even if it is cheap
Techniscope) has also been too manipulated in the Digital Internegative
process. All in all, they are all bad,
but Witch is especially awful and is
the kind of disc that could kill any format.
State has Dolby Digital 2.0 that is
barely stereo, has audio dropouts and is only so well recorded for the location
parts so the post-production audio salvages the sound somewhat, while the
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) MA 2.0 lossless mix on Witch shows how badly this was really recorded, embarrassingly so
and with DTS-MA, you can hear the manipulations better than ever. The Dolby Digital French 5.1 mix on Days is limited and does not have much
of a soundfield.
Extras are not good, with State offering superfluous Additional Footage and the rest offering
trailers, of which Witch adds a
Teaser, three lame featurettes and an Alternate Ending that is as bad as the
one retained.
- Nicholas Sheffo
