After starting 2013 out on such a bad note with A Haunted House, I thought to myself “Surely things can’t get any worse.” Then I remembered that with all the awful, horribly crafted, exploitative spoof movies out there, there’s someone twelve steps behind them making insultingly cheap spoof movies without a single productive thought behind the whole f*cking production.
At least Marlon Wayans made ballsy calls, has good production, and injects some intelligent goo found in small spurts about his film. Too bad Craig Moss has created one of the worst films in the history of cinema, eviscerating my soul with a thoughtless, brain cell killing comedy not even worth the .99 cent bargain barrel at your local going-out-of-business video store. All titles must go – except 30 Nights Of Paranormal Activity With The Devil Inside The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Honestly Craig Moss, f#ck you for making me write that.
Let me set the record straight though if you haven’t gotten the picture already.
There are movies you watch and go “Well, that was a movie.” There are movies you watch and go “Couldn’t they have put in a tad more effort?” There are movies you watch and go “OK, did I seriously just sit through that?” There are movies you watch and go “For the love of all things holy, that movie was as entertaining as a deflated blow-up female companion.” Then there are movies found about 20,000 leagues below those crap-monsters, surly convincing viewers Hollywood is reaching an end of apocalyptic proportions – the only reasonable explanation such a low-brow, hack-effort attempt at cinema could possibly have been greenlit. In fact, the only possible use I can see for Moss’ “film” (no, I refuse to say it again) would be to replace water-boarding as the main method of hostage torture. I know, sure, we don’t do that anymore, but if we did (wink wink).
Sorry I keep avoiding 30 Nights Of Paranormal Activity With The Devil Inside The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (dammit, I said I wouldn’t write that!), but it’s a film so unwatchable, I’d rather not even recall a single suck-tastic minute of nothingness. If it were up to me, I’d just list all the better things I could have done with my hour and twenty minutes, including watching A Haunted House (yes, even that would have been better) and giving myself a boiling hot enema, but the word “review” is located in this article title, so here goes nothing. Let me just pop a few adrenaline shots to keep me from dozing off in boredom…
Released as a comedy, Moss’ script is painfully unfunny, making you actually wince in discomfort with every lazy attempt at spoofage. And by “spoofage,” I of course mean the lowest form of mockery possible – snatching popular pop-culture references and running brain-dead jokes involving references mainstream America will understand. This is a horror themed movie – why are the likes of Adele, Storage Wars, The Bachelor, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo being butchered by cut-rate imitations and used for nothing but recognition? If you’ve got a snide or witty statement to make, alright, you can go for it – but when the best you’ve got is a kindergarten fat joke or pre-school fart joke? AND TO USE THEM MULTIPLE TIMES?! Hit me with one fart joke, shame on you. Hit me with two fart jokes? Shame on the morons who backed this terrible, awful, no good, very bad movie.
So what horror movies are actually spoofed? You’ve obviously got Paranormal Activity, The Devil Inside, The Last Exorcism, then The Exorcist, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and a slew of other mainstream titles which are all referenced poorly. Chalk it up to incompetent marketing or zero knowledge of the competition, but after viewing A Haunted House, I witnessed at least half the jokes be re-used here. Ghost sex, the rotating fan camera, The Devil Inside‘s interrogation scene, a bumbling paranormal investigation team – I mean the list goes on. If you’re going to release a spoof horror comedy straight to DVD, I’d suggest you make sure a mainstream film of the same nature isn’t being released at the same time? Hate to say it, but A Haunted House is going to attract all the viewers over Moss’ film first, and all those viewers will be disgusted how vast the gap in quality is. And I say that about a film I emphatically despise.
The only segment of film I could even smirk at showed the Ghost Brothers, our mindless paranormal investigators that just run around with head cameras on and claim everything is a ghost, but even their stoner-esque charm wears off after about thirty seconds. Yes, out of an hour and twenty minute screenplay, I’m able to find only thirty seconds of mild amusement. Finding creative lampooning in Moss’ writing is like finding a needle chucked into the Grand Canyon, as our writer/director doesn’t even challenge the minds of people who think Meet The Spartans is funny. Stupid humor is one thing, but brain-killing humor? I’m surprised I can even form sentences after such intellectual sabotage.
I know what you’re all saying – “How could the guy who directed The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall And Felt Superbad About It have created such a abysmal film?!” You’re not? I know, that was sarcasm.
30 Nights Of Paranormal Activity With The Devil Inside The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is what’s wrong with the current spoof culture. Pick a genre, find some barely passable celebrity imitators, make fun of pop culture, and forget everything you intended to spoof in the first place – sure, sounds like a winning formula, no? No. No, no, no, no, no – and no one in cinema history proves that better than Craig Moss. I mean, you really have to try hard to have me not even remotely interested in a lesbian make-out session featuring an Alice from Resident Evil look-a-like and a Selene from Underworld look-a-like…REALLY HARD.
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