Verdict
Summary
The movie has a witty logic to it and it moves, sounds, and feels like one of those gems you might’ve discovered in the VHS era or the early DVD boom, and its only drawback is that doesn’t look the way it should. It’s well acted, written, directed, and scored, and for a fan of horror films that buck the norm, this is a real discovery.
Plot:
A paranormal investigator’s theory is put to the test when a movie theater become possessed.
Review:
With a unique theory about the paranormal that no one believes aside from a few humble colleagues who work with him at a university, Kyle Jennings (this film’s writer and director Todd Norris) gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity from the grant board to put his theory to the test, with a possibility of a huge grant and credibility to boot. A paranormal spike occurs in a small town – in fact, it’s the same town where Kyle grew up – and he’s tasked with running some tests to figure out just what’s going on. The epicenter seems to be smack in the middle of a single-screen movie theater that has been showing a low budget zombie movie (called Z For Zombie, which we see a trailer of before this film begins), and with his team of misfit investigators and his rival at the university who holds his future in her hands, Kyle begins running tests, stumbling onto the wild fact that whatever is possessing the area actually possesses the film reel of the zombie movie specifically. The film itself is possessed, and Kyle comes to the realization that the film is a portal to the fictional world and that there’s something Kyle has to do within the movie to solve their dilemma, but going into the horror movie comes with tons of risks, namely the possibility that he’ll never be able to return back through to the real world!
Shot on a shoestring on grubby videotape, but remarkably clever and well directed and conceived despite that disadvantage, Todd Norris’s The Paranormal is so good that it’s a shame it doesn’t look better. It feels like a polished low budget indie film that should point to a prolific career of its filmmaker, but remarkably Norris never directed another feature film. This remains his only directorial feature film (he made some short films after it), which is a bummer because we got robbed of a slew of more cool movies by this guy. The movie has a witty logic to it and it moves, sounds, and feels like one of those gems you might’ve discovered in the VHS era or the early DVD boom, and its only drawback is that doesn’t look the way it should. It’s well acted, written, directed, and scored, and for a fan of horror films that buck the norm, this is a real discovery.
Visual Vengeance has just released a fully loaded Blu-ray edition of The Paranormal, and for once their lavish treatment of no-budget oddities on Blu-ray is warranted with this incredible release. They treat the movie with the respect that it deserves with tons of bonus content, new artwork, stickers, a poster, commentaries, short films, bloopers, and a totally unnecessary but hilarious “Ghost Finder” that comes in the package. This is #24 in the series of films from VV.
