Review: 'The Apparition', starring Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan

For a time now horror movies have been stagnant,  stuck in this place of torture porn or some cheap found footage mess. Long gone are the days of monsters terrorizing a nice couple or your classic All-American family. We’ve also lost the beautiful art of cheesy eighties bad horror movies. It was like back then all those movies you’d surely end up seeing on a Saturday afternoon on syndicated television were intentionally bad,  and maybe they were. But one thing can be said that The Apparition, a 2012 film was not made terrible on purpose and isn’t from the 80s no matter how much if feels like it is.

The Apparition starts out with some found footage of a seance to bring forth a ghost. It then goes into what is regular style movie that feels like an overly serious take on a Ghostbusters reboot. There's even a PKE meter looking device in this part. Soon through the power of boosting the belief of ghosts of 4 people to 400 they can bring the ghost to our realm…le sigh. So the ghost comes and bad things happen. We are then cut to somewhere else with a young woman named Kelly(Ashley Greene) who works at an animal hospital. She lives with her boyfriend Ben in a house in the new housing development that they rent from her parents. As soon as they start unpacking weird things begin to happen in the house with no clue how they are happening.

So just going by that quick synopsis you see that this film jumps around 3 times within the first 15 minutes of a 92-minute movie. You think at first it’s a found footage then somehow we get to the idea that believing in ghosts makes them real, as if they were Peter Pan fairies or something. Then somehow we are introduced to two totally new characters with little to no explanation.

The acting in this is hilariously terrible. There's never a sense of urgency or danger at any point. The ghost for most of the film basically pulls pranks like you’d see Ashton Kutcher do on Punk’d or something. Nothing really jumps at you during the whole thing. Kelly and Ben(Sebastian Stan) don’t really have any chemistry through the whole movie so at times it’s really hard to buy them together. Also it feels the filmmakers went soft to get a more acceptable rating since there are moments that feel like they wanted to go all eighties with some nudity or gore but pulled back at the last second.

This movie is by far one of the weakest so-called horror movies this year. Not even seeing Draco Malfoy(Tom Felton) again on screen didn’t help it at all.  If only the Ghostbusters were around to capture and lock this thing away forever. Please do yourself a favor and don’t see this, go and enjoy the outside or take a nap. Just sit this one out.