Poltergeist of Borley Forest, The (DVD)
Ted Hentschke
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Directed by Stephen McKendree
Starring Marina Petrano, Christopher Ingle, Nicholas Barrera, Rhea Rossiter
I’m never quite sure what kind of lens I’m supposed to look at microbudget films through. On the one hand, of course they can’t be expected to have decent film quality, CGI, lighting, sound quality, or actors. On the other hand, that’s about 90% of what makes a movie.
Microbudget productions are expected to be “clever,” making up for the obvious lack of money with an interesting premise or creative presentation. We all can point at Paranormal Activity as a good example of a well done microbudget film, but I much prefer Mike Flanagan’s Absentia. With just a $70k budget, Flanagan also struggled with inexperienced actors and lackluster film quality but managed to deliver a terrifying and compelling product.
The Poltergeist of Borley Forest is not such a product. It’s sad because at times I think the film was trying pretty hard and elicited something akin to entertainment. From a viewer’s perspective, it is almost impossible to tell if an actor is good and only able to show it when the script occasionally breaches the shit lake for air, or if the script is just fine and everyone decided to show up with not a fuck to rub against an ounce of talent. That was exactly how I felt the entire time watching this movie. Whether technical or talent limitations, something about the production was perpetually off.
Usually when there was something I liked, it came from clever writing or an uncharacteristically good shot. This isn’t the kind of writing I’d emulate out of adoration, but I did chuckle. There was a dinner table conversation close to the beginning that made me think I might actually like this movie. There was a center frame slow zoom shot of the protagonist on the bed to a 180 of some haunted flowers that was pretty good, too.
Here’s the rub: These snippets of good weren’t great, but just noticeably better than the surrounding content. The level of banter doesn’t hold up, and there was a particularly excruciating scene at a dinner where a man clearly in his mid-twenties hits on a girl in high school. Mind you, we are supposed to sympathize with him and think this scene is cute. Watching it made me feel like I had forgotten to bring candy and a pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and suspicious that the tall stern news anchor type walking into the room and asking me to take a seat might not just want to serve me tea and brownies.
Even though there were a couple shots I liked, the presentation was amateur. Poorly framed, characters were often way too far away. In a movie that is supposed to be causing tension, neutral framing at a safe distance does little to communicate fear. It was distracting. It seems that dinner scenes might be this movie’s Achilles’ heel, as there was a scene between the protagonist and her sister where the 180-degree swap between dialogue and isolated audio design made me think they were on Skype until I noticed they were in a similarly decorated room. I know that not everyone gets distracted by the nuances of film design like I do, but it actively detracted from my enjoyment of the film.
Plot-wise it’s about twin love ghosts. One tries to kill you, the other tries to stop the kill ghost. The ghosts sometimes vibrate and look like ghosts, but their final form is just a dude in a shirt with a sickle. Spoooookey. They learn about the history of the twins and enlist the help of a professional type before they have the final confrontation and, in a plot twist everyone saw coming, stop the wrong ghost. They figure this out too late, and the film ends on a reflection of murderghost in her brother’s phone. Shocker.
Now, here is my conundrum. Is this an amateur production with some moments of positive, or a cheap cash-in to try to take my money for as little production cost as possible. I’m tempted to say the first, but it is odd to look at the box and see Poltergeist in a font about 6 times the size of The and Borley Forest. The original title was You Will Love Me and was released in August of 2013. So obviously, it is just a coincidence that two years later it sees a DVD release with a new title right when the remake of Poltergeist hits theaters.
The extras we have are a cookie-cutter making of featurette, deleted scenes, and outtakes, also known as the “scraps you had just lying around” approach to “special features.” I generally do not care about special features, and the last time I enjoyed them was with the Deliver Us from Evil Blu-ray. I don’t even usually remember to check unless I have to for a review. The “scraps” approach is my reason for this distaste, as I often find that “special features” just means “shit that wasn’t good enough to make it into the movie.” It was cut for a reason, and now it just serves to check off a box on some production company list to make a cash-in less transparent.
If the producer of this film really loved it and just happened to unluckily change the name to something close to a major release and it just happened to come out around when that major release is, don’t think that I’m giving this a pass. The movie isn’t “can only watch in 10-minute chunks” bad, and I will be judging it more softly as an amateur production. But leniency does not equal blinding myself to basic facts.
My job as a critic is 20% dick jokes, 10% grandstanding, and 70% recommending a movie so that people know what to watch. I would not recommend you watch The Poltergeist of Borley Forest. I recommend Absentia to people frequently, with the caveat that the poor film stock and sometimes flat acting does take some looking past to appreciate the diamond inside all of that rough. That is proper consideration for a microbudget production, not excusing the terrible to pump up the mediocre.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
