Friday, March 15, 2013

100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012)

Another in the proliferation of crappy found footage movies that are dumped on the unsuspecting public every week.  Let's face it, they're almost all the same and usually horrible. Yet I still watch....

Paranormal investigators go to the site of the infamous Speck murders to look for paranormal activity.  They walk around, start getting murdered, scenes move slowly, people do stupid things, and there is a lot of screeching by some of the girls.  Sure, constant screaming is a realistic reaction, but it's annoying as hell for the viewer. Don't subject the viewer to it!

The building in the film is supposed to be a college dorm.  It  looks nothing like the building on the cover, and instead is the abandoned Linda Vista Hospital in Los Angeles.  Horror movie fans will recognize it immediately as tons of horror movies have been filmed there.  I wonder if anyone's bothered to make a list of them?

The investigators are clueless and will have you thinking about what idiots they are when they do things like this:
  1. while trying to escape a malevolent force, they stumble into a utility room with lots of bird cages. Wow, this is sure is a lot of bird cages, they note. But even though it was previously mentioned that Speck was known as the bird man, no one is able to put it together.  
  2. they leave one of the girls alone to go follow a massive trail of blood from a colleague that was dragged off.  After pondering his fate, all of a sudden they realize they've left someone alone. Yes, you knew that when you left because she refused to go with you.   
  3. they see a man on one of the monitors behind one of the girls.  When they scream that someone's behind her, she says there's no one there. They keep screaming at her, she keeps saying it's all clear. Eventually they say, "how can she not see him?"  
Good god, you're there to investigate paranormal activity. Are there no synapses firing to tell you that you might have found exactly what you're looking for at an inopportune time?  You idiots!

And what's up with using a real murderers name in your subtitle?  Speck isn't necessary for the film.  You can tell the same story without using his name.  Also I would argue that he's not, (as the cover claims), America's most notorious mass murderer.  This just seems like a really bad idea.

Plus if you're going to use his name and murder details, why make up a different location for the murders? The real Speck murders took place in a townhouse which would be closer to the size of the building on the DVD cover rather than a massive multiple story hospital.

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