(IMAGE: Make it Happen Films)
Make it Happen Films. 2021. Horror. 102 minutes.
RATING: 0 out of 4
You might have missed it, but there’s a new Paranormal Activity movie out on Paramount Plus. (Full disclosure: I appear in the accompanying documentary about the franchise.) As such, the timing must have seemed right for every Paranormal Activity rip-off and knock-off to come out of the woodwork, as welcome as termites doing likewise. Beyond Paranormal isn’t as obvious as some in its imitation – it’s not a found footage movie, for example, but rather a fictional movie about the making of viral found footage. But it’s decidedly among the vast majority that fundamentally do not understand what made those movies work. According to its PR, Beyond Paranormal won Best Feature, Director and the Scream Queen Award at something called the Halloween Haunt Film Festival. Which only makes me wonder how utterly devoid of merit every single other entry must have been.
I’ll say this: it takes balls for a movie with very little budget to kick things off in Aztec times. This allows for some near-naked characters in big head-dresses to cut some throats, and then – bizarrely – don a modern spacesuit. But soon enough, we’re in modern times. Where the Aztecs will, of course, periodically return as absurd ghosts.
Lilly (Cortney Palm) is one of those aspiring actresses who gets by with little body fat and faking horniness, as scant compensation for her irritating pseudo-method acting and terrible fake accents. If Palm is deliberately playing this as an annoying parody, brava, but it’s too good – even spending an hour and a half with her onscreen becomes grating fast. Ryan Donowho is Ray, her long-suffering boyfriend who’s a writer on deadline. Gamely, and masochistically, he has agreed to stay with her in a director’s house as she constantly films viral videos at all hours in preparation for her next project. She, in turn, constantly betrays his trust, lies about when the camera is on, and lapses into badly overacted “character” at inopportune times. Because her director, Chaz (Oliver Cooper), is a complete moron, a cokehead white guy who talks like Flavor Flav, he loves everything she does, and can somehow manipulate her YouTube Likes to seem lower and supposedly make her try harder.
Meanwhile, the Aztecs keep showing up in Ray’s nightly hallucinations. And Clint Howard shows up on a streaming show as a nutty professor who tries to explain why exactly we saw a spacesuit in the opening sequence.
Donowho does some of that getting up at night and standing/staring stuff that we know and love from Paranormal Activity, but mostly he looks really pissed off about the whole thing, which gives audiences at least one thing to relate to. Lilly simply doesn’t seem like a girlfriend worth the trouble, especially once she cuts off their sex life completely. Chaz, who only has to interact with her from afar, may be happy enough with her nude scenes, but they are nowhere near enough to salvage what the rest of us have to watch. Even when she seems to become possessed, she’s more irritating than terrifying
It’s fundamentally unclear whether writer-director Matteo Ribaudo actually thinks this is scary, or is some sort of spoof. Certainly parts of the movie are laughable, especially the finale (if you must watch, at least fast forward to the end scene, where most of the gore budget was clearly spent). But the humor isn’t consistent enough, unless awkward “foreign” and Southern accents sound inherently hilarious. And the nearly nude Aztecs just don’t look supernatural enough to be frightening – their scenes mostly play like like a couple of Rio Carnaval extras stopped in to use the bathroom and get a drink.
It’s rare that a movie like this seems as though it could have played better as found footage. But then, anyone finding this footage would probably throw it back. And all involved might thank them later.
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