What an awful pile of incompetent and lazy shit this film is.
Somehow, someone convinced someone else to pony up the readies to pay for this amateur-hour demonstration of how not to make a film.
This lame story has a bunch of friends fooling around with an Ouija board. They stuff it up and accidentally release a Djinn (an evil fire demon) who escapes and comes after them one by one. Good f*cking riddance to the lot of ‘em, I say.
In one of the featurettes someone says that the plot is different, it’s more obscure and it has classic scary moments. What a load of bollocks. There’s nothing different about the plot. It’s not more obscure and I think he meant it has ‘clichéd’ scary moments, not ‘classic’.
Further, you hate all the characters, so you want them all to die. But they just don’t die fast enough or horribly enough for my taste.
In fact, you root for the evil Djinn. Sometimes you even yell out helpful information to him when he’s not killing the stupid kids fast enough.
“The oven! Use the oven! Turn on the gas and light a match! It’ll kill them all in one shot!”
I’m not going to point the finger at any one person who I think is responsible for this, because everyone involved should hang their heads in shame. The lazy direction, the lame screenplay written by four people, the god-awful acting, the atrocious and bloody annoying score... the list goes on and on and on...
...and on and on…
And just in case you think I’m being harsh, well, I am. If this film didn’t take itself so seriously and enjoyed a modicum of humour, then I could cut it some slack and say that it at least tries to have some fun and adds something to the already bloated decomposing corpse of the genre. But there’s no humour, the shocks are lazy and telegraphed by the incompetent score. The result is a film that you just can’t work up any enthusiasm for.
God, this film makes me mad. See, what kills me is that filmmaking would be something so exciting to be involved with, you’d think that it would bring out the best in everyone, especially people determined to prove that they can cut it in the film world.
Instead, we get this pile of crap. Utterly, utterly forgettable crap.
A good transfer is so easy to review. What do you need to know? The aspect ratio is 1.85:1, it’s 16:9 enhanced, it’s a dark film with a dark picture without much detail in the shadows. It seems intentionally this way, as it’s mostly set at night or in dark interiors, so the mood is a bit oppressive. Overall, it’s a fairly good quality picture. The compression seems to deal with the grain and detail well, generally free from anything you might label as a defect. Colourwise, there’s not much chance for the hues to really get their sea-legs, but what does manage to peer out of the darkness looks good and strong. This gets two hacked off thumbs up.
Trying to be objective about this bit, I guess I can say that the 384kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is sufficiently capable of adding oomph to the film. There’s a bit of good bass to lend support to the club scenes early on with its doof-doofish music. All channels push a bit of air when they want to try to scare you with loud noises, which is the one big trick they have and they use it each and every bloody time (and this gets annoying really fast). It does have some effective panning through the channels and directional effects which tie-in the on-screen activity a few times, so that’s a plus.
Best I can tell, this was originally a stereo recording, so whatever my opinion of the film, the DVD ultimately comes up with a fairly good result for listeners.
There are a few worthless things to look at on this DVD, so let me tell you about them saving you the boredom of having to see them for yourself:
Featurette 1
2:47 of rubbish. Worthless. Nothing to be learnt here. The actors all seem to think that because it’s British, it’s going to be honest, more genuine, scary etc etc. I doubt they’d seen the finished film at this stage.
Featurette 2
Another 3:29 of the same rubbish. I’m sure there’s a reason why this and the previous featurette hadn’t been edited together, but I’ll be buggered if I know what it is.
Behind the Scenes
Four segments of production footage, running for a grand total of 1 minute and 53 seconds -it was hardly worth the effort. A case of extras for the sake of extras, perhaps, as seems to be the case based on the extras so far.
Teaser Trailer
The style of this trailer borrows from many other films. Even so, it’s probably better than the film.
Theatrical Trailer
This is a little more true to the film. I noticed they spell Djinn “JIN” in it, presumably because they didn’t think they’re target audiences would be able to pronounce it correctly with a 'D' and 2 'N’s. Either that or whoever cut the trailer can’t spell.
Back to the Future Trilogy Trailer
Yeah, like Back to the Future really needed the support of advertising on this DVD. It will probably do more harm than good. If anyone ever sees it, that is.
I can’t recommend this film for any reason to anyone. There are so many better things to watch, that I couldn’t even begin to start listing other places to start. This is thoroughly lazy in its inception and without a shred of originality. It makes a good case for the halting of the film-funding system in England
If, on the other hand, you happen to like this film or are just a devotee to all things worthless, then you can at least rest assured that you are getting a competent transfer of the film, even if the extra features amount to bugger all.
Personally, I’m glad this review is over.
