THE APPARITION is yet another CGI ghost film from the good ol' US of A. Apparently, producers haven't cottoned on yet that the general viewing public are sick and tired of these clichéd, poorly written products, so they keep on churning them out. This one's the work of Dark Castle Entertainment, who first came to light with the remakes of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and THIRTEEN GHOSTS at the turn of the century, but whose horror fare has steadily deteriorated ever since.
The plotting of THE APPARITION is entirely boring for the most part. It involves an unlikable and self-centred couple who discover their home is haunted by the traditional CGI spook. Cue lots of CGI-augmented scare scenes and not much sense. Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan make for the most boring, vapid leading characters I've seen for a while in a film, and I was hoping they'd be bumped off by the vengeful spook early on in the proceedings. No such luck.
Where THE APPARITION has promise is in its filmed back story, taking place during the 1970s, where a team of university researchers manage to conjure up the spook. Tom Felton (13HRS) is on hand and as a whole this is very interesting stuff, based on documented records. If the whole film had been set in the 1970s and stayed with these characters (a la THE CONJURING) then it might have been more interesting, instead of the usual generic mess.
The plotting of THE APPARITION is entirely boring for the most part. It involves an unlikable and self-centred couple who discover their home is haunted by the traditional CGI spook. Cue lots of CGI-augmented scare scenes and not much sense. Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan make for the most boring, vapid leading characters I've seen for a while in a film, and I was hoping they'd be bumped off by the vengeful spook early on in the proceedings. No such luck.
Where THE APPARITION has promise is in its filmed back story, taking place during the 1970s, where a team of university researchers manage to conjure up the spook. Tom Felton (13HRS) is on hand and as a whole this is very interesting stuff, based on documented records. If the whole film had been set in the 1970s and stayed with these characters (a la THE CONJURING) then it might have been more interesting, instead of the usual generic mess.