There's been a slew of truly great horror films this year exiled to VOD debuts The Tall Man, Rec Genesis, Rites of Spring, Lovely Molly amongst many others hell even Piranha 3DD had it's moments. So why is that we've been tortured the last two weekends with The Apparition and now The Possession. A generic youth targeted horror yarn that fits it's lame over used title.The film centers on a young girl, a child of divorce of course who cons her dad into buying her some crap from a yard sale one item being an old wooden box with carvings in hebrew on it.Eventually she gets it open and the force within it begins to take hold of her. At first it's slight things before moving onto aggressive behavior. Soon after her father discovers it's a Dibuk box that holds an evil spirit. That spirit has of course inhabited his daughter so he entails the help of religious Rabi played by rap/reggae maestro Matsyuah to help him exorcise his daughter. Yes the film is a Jewish sort of play on the exorcist but the results are mostly unintentionally funny. The screenplay has moments of inspiration but is too clichéd to be throughly engaging, the direction is amateur at best there are pacing issues as well as odd cuts that make the overall effect confused and silly. The spfx are all pretty standard with some inspired gags mostly seen in the trailers, the score is absurdly dramatic and unfitting and as for the performances. Natasha Gal in the lead as Em is pretty bad. Her performance is uneven, annoying and overly dramatic which I'm sure has a lot to do with the atrocious direction. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is runner up in the bad performance department especially in his supposed tear inducing emotional scenes. Kyra Sedgwick is pretty much the only ray of light and even she's only solid 80 percent of the time and actually Matsyuah is not too bad either even though his character feels like he's plugged in as an afterthought. And I just loved how the sold out idiotic audience laughed at the way in which he performed the religious ceremony and chuckled whenever he appeared on screen in his religious garb. Enforcing the type of audience this is geared towards.The film is just grade F cinematic muck it's insulting and pretty embarrassing on almost every level. I mean after last week's cinematic genre dud The Apparition I didn't think it could get much worse but it does but at least that film was a lot shorter at 75 mins. this one clocks in at an unforgivable 105 mins. and you can feel every moment of it. If Sam Raimi keeps producing crap like this no one is gonna turn out for his unnecessary Evil Dead remake. Also I really don't have anything against PG-13 horror films I enjoyed both Ring films, The first Grudge, Haunting in Connecticut, When a stranger calls and so many others it's just that I have a thing against bad movies with little to no redeemable qualities. And judged by the characters actions in these films it's obvious they are living on a different line of reality than we are, maybe in that dimension this garbage passes as a movie. The scariest thing about this whole production is that the filmmakers have left it open for a sequel. Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! 1.5/5
Review of The Possession
