Just when you thought it was safe ... safe to believe New Dominion could not turn out anything worse than BLOOD VISIONS, Haunting series producers send a clear message that with DARK DREAMS their capacities are not to be underestimated. Why stop at jumping the shark? -- when you can hit rock bottom.
Mental illnesses such as schizophrenia are diagnosed for both their positive symptoms (i.e., word salad, delusions) and their negative symptoms (i.e., social withdrawal, lack of emotion). In a similar vein, A Haunting Season 5 has shown a poverty of writing, acting, sound, and cinematography (negative symptoms) as well as visually neauseating transition effects and the insane delusion that viewers are moved (positive symptoms). All of these "symptoms" are harmful to the story, but never has an episode told the story so poorly - as to make the program incoherent and difficult to follow. My reference to schizophrenia was inspired by DARK DREAMS, whose storyboarding resembled a salad of dialog and images that broke every rule when it came to good structure in much the same way an old social experiment of mine from the Appalachian Mountains violated every rule of grammar when he spoke. Just because the story of Gibbons' haunting features some bad dreams does not mean the episode itself has to resemble one. I found myself when reviewing this episode struggling to make sense of how it did not make sense.
I am going to give Christopher Gibbons, author of Trespass, the benefit of the doubt in assuming the real events on which DARK DREAMS was based were in fact scary and interesting. This did not come out in the episode. In fact I laughed more than I should have during this episode, where the most ghost-like disembodied aspect of the whole program were the teeth of the actor portraying Gibbons. (You may want to use a little less whitening agent). If I had been throwing back any sort of fluid (whether it was whiskey or milk) it would have come out through my nose during the rendering of Gibbons' dream of being lifted and pushed out the window on invisible meat hooks. Given a camera, director's chair, and editing equipment, I could have established and escalated the tension right up to its harrowing conclusion -- because somehow I don't think Gibbons found anything funny about his dream. Just a guess.
If I have to single out one troubling moment from the episode, I refer to the scene that takes place AFTER everyone agreed the ghost had been banished from the home. Gibbons opens the cupboard and tangles with what appears to be a swarm of flies (the ghost) but we quickly find out the battle takes place in his head (i.e, a dream) and he is really asleep -- only he is not in bed but fully clothed -- and sitting up! -- during a family meeting in the living room. Talk about confusing.
And I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but can we please make the ghosts look less computer generated? As it is the series has to fight its 10PM time slot on DESTINATION America where a story aspiring to be taken seriously as a haunting tale is interrupted for QuiBids ads and ads promoting shows about moonshiners and barbecue grillmasters. (Nothing stokes the flames of skepticism more than a high-definition Samsung television for seven dollars and sixty-eight cents). But the program was totally incapable at generating the least bit of fear or suspense over the opening of a cupboard we were led to believe contained a ghost. Somehow we knew whatever jumped out at us would underwhelm and we just wanted to be done with it!
Mental illnesses such as schizophrenia are diagnosed for both their positive symptoms (i.e., word salad, delusions) and their negative symptoms (i.e., social withdrawal, lack of emotion). In a similar vein, A Haunting Season 5 has shown a poverty of writing, acting, sound, and cinematography (negative symptoms) as well as visually neauseating transition effects and the insane delusion that viewers are moved (positive symptoms). All of these "symptoms" are harmful to the story, but never has an episode told the story so poorly - as to make the program incoherent and difficult to follow. My reference to schizophrenia was inspired by DARK DREAMS, whose storyboarding resembled a salad of dialog and images that broke every rule when it came to good structure in much the same way an old social experiment of mine from the Appalachian Mountains violated every rule of grammar when he spoke. Just because the story of Gibbons' haunting features some bad dreams does not mean the episode itself has to resemble one. I found myself when reviewing this episode struggling to make sense of how it did not make sense.
I am going to give Christopher Gibbons, author of Trespass, the benefit of the doubt in assuming the real events on which DARK DREAMS was based were in fact scary and interesting. This did not come out in the episode. In fact I laughed more than I should have during this episode, where the most ghost-like disembodied aspect of the whole program were the teeth of the actor portraying Gibbons. (You may want to use a little less whitening agent). If I had been throwing back any sort of fluid (whether it was whiskey or milk) it would have come out through my nose during the rendering of Gibbons' dream of being lifted and pushed out the window on invisible meat hooks. Given a camera, director's chair, and editing equipment, I could have established and escalated the tension right up to its harrowing conclusion -- because somehow I don't think Gibbons found anything funny about his dream. Just a guess.
If I have to single out one troubling moment from the episode, I refer to the scene that takes place AFTER everyone agreed the ghost had been banished from the home. Gibbons opens the cupboard and tangles with what appears to be a swarm of flies (the ghost) but we quickly find out the battle takes place in his head (i.e, a dream) and he is really asleep -- only he is not in bed but fully clothed -- and sitting up! -- during a family meeting in the living room. Talk about confusing.
And I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but can we please make the ghosts look less computer generated? As it is the series has to fight its 10PM time slot on DESTINATION America where a story aspiring to be taken seriously as a haunting tale is interrupted for QuiBids ads and ads promoting shows about moonshiners and barbecue grillmasters. (Nothing stokes the flames of skepticism more than a high-definition Samsung television for seven dollars and sixty-eight cents). But the program was totally incapable at generating the least bit of fear or suspense over the opening of a cupboard we were led to believe contained a ghost. Somehow we knew whatever jumped out at us would underwhelm and we just wanted to be done with it!