The Apparition Review

Rated PG-13 (Terror/Frightening Images and Some Sensuality)

Running Time: 1 Hour & 22 Minutes

Cast-

Ashley Greene-Kelly

Sebastian Stan-Ben

Tom Felton-Patrick

Luke Pasqualino-Greg

Julianna Guill-Lydia

Rick Gomez-Mike

Anna Clark-Maggie

Tim Williams-Office Executive

Marti Matulis-The Apparition

Directed by Todd Lincoln

Maybe you guys should call the Ghostbusters? Baseball bat isn't going to do you any good!

The month of August is home to some notoriously bad films as studios clean house before gearing up for all their possible awards contenders in the fall, although releases like 2007's "The Bourne Ultimatum" and last year's "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" have begun to buck that trend. Unfortunately, all that progress has now been thrown out the window with the arrival of late-summer horror flick "The Apparition," another cookie-cutter offering from Joel Silver's Dark Castle Entertainment starring Sebastian Stan and Ashley Greene of "Twilight" fame. The last horror film I saw was Bradley Parker and Oren Peli's "Chernobyl Diaries" back in May and despite receiving highly negative reviews with 21% on Rotten Tomatoes, it still managed to turn a small profit of $18 million (the production budget was an incredibly low $1 million). In a summer dominated by big-budget blockbusters like "The Avengers" and "The Dark Knight Rises," I honestly was looking forward to seeing "The Apparition" just for some cheap genre thrills but it can't even meet these modest expectations. Clichéd, devoid of any scares, and featuring one of the dullest on-screen couples I've ever seen, "The Apparition" is so ineptly put together by first time director Todd Lincoln that you have to wonder if he's just incompetent or plain lazy. What's even more disheartening is the fact that people will actually pay to see this garbage. 

In 1973, a group of parapsychologists perform a séance using a drawing as a reference in an attempt to contact a spirit named Charles Reamer. This 'Charles Experiment' is repeated decades later by a group of college students, Patrick (Tom Felton), Greg (Luke Pasqualino), and Lydia (Julianna Guill), who focus their minds on a statue representation of Charles with the aid of modern technology. The experiment is a success but an otherworldly entity is accidentally unleashed and during the ensuing chaos, Lydia is pulled into the darkness. Sometime later, Ben (Sebastian Stan) and his loving girlfriend Kelly (Ashley Green) are settling into their new home, which is part of a remote housing development in Palmdale, California that was recently purchased by Kelly's parents as an investment property. The couple spends their day shopping for personal items at the local Costco before returning home. Falling asleep in each other's arms, Kelly wakes up in the middle of the night to discover that all their front and back doors are wide open with no alerts from the alarm. The security company does not find anything out of the ordinary but Ben sets up video surveillance around the house just to be safe. However, strange occurrences such as moving shadows and inaudible whispers continue to haunt the young couple, with an omnipresent mold spreading throughout the house. Kelly and Ben soon realize that they are being targeted by a malevolent entity that seeks to invade our world. 

"The Apparition" has so many problems that I don't even know where to even begin! The only person to blame for this mess is Todd Lincoln because not only did he direct the film but he also served as its writer and producer. Ripping off of Peli's "Paranormal Activity" series and every Japanese horror flick in the past ten years, there is not one ounce of originality here as it devolves into a maddeningly pointless exercise of slow camera movements punctuated by the occasional flickering light or loud noise. The running time is a mercifully short 1 hour and 22 minutes but the lethargic pacing drains all the tension away while Lincoln pads his film with meaningless shots that convey absolutely nothing. The number of aerial/establishing shots of the home and its surrounding neighborhood soon grows tiresome after the umpteenth time and it's immediately clear that this rookie director lacks any sense of personal style. Even the score from Tom Hajdu and Andy Milburn of 'tomandandy' feels distractingly out of place.  The so-called 'scares' fail to drum up any excitement and even gets downright hilarious, such as when a neighbor's dog just suddenly drops dead from staring at a corner in the couple's laundry room. This prompted Brian Tallerico of HollywoodChicago.com to write in his review that 'with the poor mutt's ridiculous death, we've lost the most likable character in the story.' The only tense moment comes during an out-of-body experience where Ben is forced to watch helplessly while his girlfriend suffocates under the bed sheets but even these are few and far between, and are so obviously telegraphed in advance that much of their impact has been diluted. The dialogue is mind-numbingly dull, suffering from vague exposition and absurd techno-babble like 'psychomanteum' but the two lead characters fare the worse as they make asinine decisions and generally behave in an idiotic manner. Ben and Kelly spend the better part of the film running around peeking into dark corners and reacting to every little noise yet they refuse to acknowledge the fact that their house may be haunted until it's too late. The only audience that will find "The Apparition" remotely appealing is teenagers who hope to get to second base with their dates. 

With the film already so bad, it should come as no surprise that the performances are downright terrible. Ashley Greene is an attractive woman but her acting leaves a lot to be desired as she functions as little more than eye-candy, frequently stripping down to her underwear to keep our attention, although her moments of panic and confusion are somewhat convincing. Sebastian Stan is trapped in a permanently sullen mood and shares virtually no chemistry with Greene. The opening scenes that set up their relationship are painful to watch. Marvel Studios should really look into recasting the part of the Winter Soldier in the "Captain America" sequel because I cannot see Stan pulling off such an important role. With Ben and Kelly so poorly-developed, it's hard to really care about what they're going through, let alone fearing for their lives. Tom Felton (or Draco Malfoy) shows up in the latter half of the film to sprout some nonsense but there's a conviction behind his performance that puts him a cut above his boring co-stars. 

Released on August 24, 2012, "The Apparition" has received overwhelmingly negative reviews with a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now that is something you do not see every day. Apparently Warner Brothers felt so little confidence in Lincoln's project (and partly due to their discontinued support of Dark Castle Entertainment) that they're just dumping it in the second to last week of August in only 810 theaters. The previews have also been outright misleading as the tagline 'Once you believe, you die' has nothing to do with anything in the film and completely misrepresents its premise. Adding insult to injury, both the poster and the trailer spoil the ending. Surprisingly, WB did hold advance screenings this past Thursday, even though the studio was making a concerted effort to hide the film from critics (never a good sign). It was a sparsely attended affair with the audience erupting in laughter at all the weak jump scares, with one of them being a blatant carbon copy of both "The Ring" but instead of a television, the entity crawls out of a washing machine. Given its limited release, it won't make much of an impression at the box office and is on track for a paltry $1 to $2 million debut yet what's even more shocking is that it took $17 million to make this crap. Not only is "The Apparition" one of the most inept horror flicks ever made but it's also one of the worst films of the year and everyone involved in its production ought to be ashamed. How studio executives even green-light garbage like this is truly mind-boggling. Then again, there's also "Battleship" so enough said.  

Final Rating: 1 out of 5

"We opened the door and it came through. It's like a virus; it knows you're afraid…spreads from one person to another. It wants to be in our world! It wants us!"