Tag Archives: matisyahu

Star Rating: 1/5

Director:

• Ole Bornedal – Nightwatch, Deliver Us From Evil, 1864

Producer:

• Sam Raimi – Xena: Warrior Princess, Spiderman I-III, The Evil Dead

Cast:

• Jeffrey Dean Morgan – Watchmen, Grey’s Anatomy, Red Dawn
• Natasha Calis – Donovan’s Echo, The Firm
• Madison Davenport – Jack and the Beanstalk, Shameless, Noah
• Kyra Sedgwick – Man on a Ledge, The Closer, Chlorine
• Grant Show – Melrose Place, Marmalade, All Ages Night
• Matisyahu

In my review of The Woman in Black, I spoke of the urgent need for the horror-genre to be revamped. Too often, so-called ‘horror’ films have become formulaic and a joke. Well, unbelievably, the genre has sunk even lower due to The Possession.

The Possession is a supernatural horror movie based on a true story. (Yeah right.) Em (Natasha Calis) and Hannah (Madison Davenport) are two young girls, whose parents are divorced. While staying with their father, Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), they go to a yard sale to purchase some new things for their father’s new house.

At the sale, Em comes across an old wooden box with an inscription of Hebrew writing and buys it. Little does she know, though, that the box contains a Dibbuk (Hebrew for an ‘evil spirit’). Em doesn’t find out until after she opens it. But by then it is too late, as the Dibbuk is already consuming both her soul and her flesh.

The Possession is neither scary nor interesting, thereby making the film feel a lot longer than its 92 minutes. Also, starting the movie with ‘based on a true story’ just renders the film stupid. One is generally not going to take a film seriously after watching human beings fly upside down across rooms, before smashing into walls and denting the brickwork. (Because that happens in real life, doesn’t it?)

It is not as if those scenes are unique to The Possession either, as the recent The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Rite and The Devil Inside attest. Like all of those films, The Possession suffers from an embarrassing number of clichés, which seem to be endlessly recycled in (bad) horror movies. Seeing (poorly-made CGI) insects coming out of someone’s throat or hearing a young girl talking with the voice of a nasty old hag has been done so many times that it ceases to shock or scare.

Combined with these standard techniques is the reprocessed music. Usually these unoriginal scores at least make viewers’ hearts flutter and pump up their adrenaline. In The Possession, however, it doesn’t even do that. The music sometimes threatens to make one feel that he/she will be jumping out of their skin by the end of the scene. Yet, because the film builds up to a climax that invariably doesn’t happen, the non-atmospheric music is reduced to pointlessness to the extent that the scenes would have been tenser with silence.

And in case The Possession isn’t pathetic enough, the acting is terrible and the script is even worse. Indeed, it is all so dreadful that it almost forces one to question how a donor or Sam Raimi (whose reputation has plummeted since the much-maligned Spiderman 3) could have been duped into thinking that The Possession was a film worth making. At least The Woman in Black was an adaptation from a successful theatre production, so there was an excuse for it to be made. The Possession, on the other hand, has no such strong foundation and is almost solely the result of (the lack of) imagination on behalf of Stiles White and Juliet Snowden (both of whom helped to write Knowing, an appalling movie that was all over the place).

Over-all, The Possession is yet another wretched and stereotypical horror film. It adds nothing new to the genre, is neither funny nor frightening, and is remarkably dull. How many more ‘horror’ movies like this can Hollywood make before donors, directors and producers alike gain some dignity and pull the plug on this woeful genre?

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