Review“There is definitely something in this room with me.” - MadisonWe learn that back in the day when keeping slaves was a.o.k a woman in the French quarter of New Orleans named Madame LaLaurie took things slightly too far, she kept slaves chained in the attic for dubious experiments. When the house caught fire Madame fled the City, well how was she going to explain a sex change operation that went wrong, and a boy with half his face pealed off, and is rumoured to have taken up residence in a certain house in St. Francisville. The implications are that Madame LaLaurie continued her insane experiments in the new house. Flash to the present day and a group to twenty something, dumb as a box of hammers, victims are going to spend the night in the most haunted house in St. Francisville, hopefully to document an actual haunting. Load up the shoulder cameras let's pretend it's real and not a Blair Witch clone. In the wake of The Blair Witch Project shilling the rubes and becoming the most successful Indie movie ever, a number of things happened. We got the invariable parodies of what was after all a fairly excruciatingly bad movie, and surprisingly the porn movie makers were all over it. But even worse we got a bunch of would be film makers suddenly realising they could make a buck by using the old “it's all real, here's the footage” gimmick. After disclosures pointing out The Blair Witch Project (BWP) wasn't as original as some people thought, hello Cannibal Holocaust, and further that the movie was scripted, the floodgates opened. Unfortunately the copy cats didn't learn from BWP's mistakes, repeated them, and we got a bunch of movies that made BWP look like Academy award material. The St. Francisville Experiment is a very poor imitation of BWP, and manages to involves a couple of Actresses who are even more obnoxious than the horrid Heather Donahue. We get a similar set-up to BWP with the film makers providing the background to the house, which surprisingly promises some good times ahead, followed by a series of interviews with various people who don't seem to be providing us with anything useful. I have to say St. Francisville sets the scene nicely and I was getting all hyped up to see a decent haunting going down. When it comes to our would be documentary film makers the movie starts to fall apart. We have Madison “The White Light” Charap who is simply horrible and full of the sort of new age mysticism BS that normally gets you thrown out of parties down south here. Backing up our so called Psychic is Ryan Larson, a history student who seems to have been included cause she has big tits, blonde hair, and bares her midriff on occasion. Neither gal can produce a good scream, making their involvement simply irritating on the Heather Donahue meter. Tim Thompson is supposedly the cameraman, but since we clearly have a whole bunch of other cameras during hell night, he was somewhat redundant besides asking in one hilarious moment, “How badly is it dead?”. That line of document was up there with the whole “I love all the ghosts”, frack were these people smoking da herb before entering the house! Oh and finally we get Paul Cason as the team leader, who I had no confidence in from the get go. Once in the house, which naturally happens during night time as that's the only time the spooks are apt to rattle chains, we get a series of stock standard scares interspersed with irritating chatter amongst the cast. A chandelier falls down narrowly missing, if by narrow you mean half a room away, one of the ghost busters. A chair flies across an attic. Madison tries to channel Heather Donahue. And a sandwich, horror, has a roach in it. Naturally we go for the ending, that calls to mind the whole Madame LaLaurie home science experiments, but unfortunately we don't get anyone getting a richly deserved death scene. Damn, waited the whole movie to see one of these mokes bite the dust and it doesn't happen. The dialogue is terribly, is Madison worse than Heather? - and the thrills and spills are about what you would expect in a fairground haunted house. Pity really as they could have really worked the investigation of the house angle rather than losing it completely in the final 10 minutes. It might just be me but I also got the distinct impression we moved to a different building at stages, the rooms and levels seems to be pretty wonky otherwise. No recommendation, this one is even worse than BWP, if that's possible, but on the bright side of the torture chamber the movie seems to be only available via the good folk at eBay or for the desperate youtube.com. Just to be kind and stuff, we're including the entire movie below, knock yourself out kids.
ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ... Had the ability to go awesome but decided not to.
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