By Every now and then, a horror film comes around that is so well-crafted, so atmospheric, so full of unyielding dread, that it changes one’s life. I’m talking about the kind of movie that haunts you, that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater, the type of movie that makes you leave a light on at night. This sort of movie only comes around once every decade or so, crawling under your skin, giving you the straight-up heebie-jeebies.
The Apparition is 100% not this type of movie.
The Apparition
Director: Todd Lincoln
Rating: PG-13
Release Date: August 24, 2012
The Apparition follows Alice from Twilight and her boyfriend, Bucky Barnes as they move in to her parents’ house in the suburbs. Things seem pretty alright until locked doors start opening without consent, weird mold appears all over the place, and the neighbor’s dog just kind of lays down and dies in the laundry room. Before long, you find out that Bucky was involved in some spooky experiments in the supernatural with his friend Draco Malfoy and Malfoy, meddling prick he is, pushed the experiment even further, releasing something from beyond. Editor’s note: I used italics because the titular apparition is really, really ill-defined. Can anything stop our lovely leading lady and her stalwart boyfriend from being…pulled into walls? Maybe! The answers(?) lie with Draco Malfoy!
This film started out with a lot of promise, mostly because there was an Ashley Greene shower scene followed by an Ashley Green underwear scene, and some fairly creepy groundwork being laid. Then, as soon as you find out that Sebastian Stan has been hiding something from her, things started to slip. The more we find out about the apparition, the more the movie unravels. I sat through the scant hour and twenty-two minutes and can’t really tell you much about it besides it can do pretty much anything. Need a relic from your paranormal experiment from a couple years back? Just poke at the weird mold hive that’s shown up on your kitchen wall. Want some wooden hangers bent into weird balloon animal shapes? The apparition is on the case. Neighbor’s dog comes to visit? Keep it out of the laundry room or it will die because of ???. I complain about movies like the rebooted Friday the 13th because they give too much backstory. The Apparition suffered from the opposite. Even as they explain what it is, they’re basically saying they don’t know what it is.
The highlights of this movie, the aforementioned shower and underwear scenes, happen early on and then there’s really not much to look forward to after that. Lots of scared looks on peoples’ faces followed by those people being pulled into walls or…whatever. The end of the movie shows us what to look forward to on the other side and it’s basically the movie’s poster. Hope you like getting mass-groped by hands in a tent in the middle of a CostCo. I would’ve warned you about spoilers but I don’t care and you won’t either.
The worst part is they keep the curious few who make it through to the credits are kept glued to their seats as they’re shown grainy footage of power lines and such, making one think that maybe, just maybe there will be a scene at the end that will explain something. NOPE.
There’s not much else to say about this film. The three main actors (there’s a couple other people involved but none of them matter) all act competently enough, but they can’t help that they’re in a bad film. They might not need to worry though, considering all of them have much more successful franchises to lean on. Yes, Harry Potter is over, but hopefully Tom Felton wasn’t depending on The Apparition to put food on the table.
The Apparition is bad and all parties involved should feel bad. I love horror movies, and I understand that most of them are mediocre, but when the credits rolled on this movie I felt like I had been wronged, like my dog had wandered over to my neighbor’s house and mysteriously died in their laundry room. Would an R have helped this movie? Probably not. More F-words would not have fixed things. It was a mess. What may have helped? More scantly-clad Ashley Greene. I’d watch her read a phone book for an hour and a half.
Please don’t see this movie. If you do, they will make a sequel and I’ll have to review that piece of crap too.