Episode 50

I wanted this movie to be good. I really did! I enjoyed movies like The Last Exorcism, the Paranormal Activity's, and other documentary-style cinematography films. The character development is extremely slow and the acting is borderline horrendous. The special effects could have been much better! I generally enjoy low-budget films and can usually overlook mediocre acting. Unfortunately, this was tested my tolerance for both. I did make myself finish the film hoping the end would justify the effort of making myself sit through it. Not so much. In a nutshell, a wealthy gentleman sends two teams, with opposing views/opinions (one scientifically driven and the other spiritually motivated) into a haunted insane asylum and wants to see what they find. Sounds like a pretty legit plot to me. I was in! This is as good as it got for me.....the plot. I was very displeased with this movie.

I worked on this "film" There is no way that it was near 1.3 million dollars unless the producers paid themselves 1,270,000. It would be utterly embarrassing if the budget were that high to produce this product, and utterly criminal if they spent this money without paying any of the working crew (the shoot was done by a few very dedicated, very inexperienced interns). And not even pay for the use of camera equipment - one supplied by the unpaid shooter, the other by the unpaid intern. Its half laughable, half disturbing that a production company would advertise a budget on a production to be so much higher than it actually was (maybe $30,000 for production). They should be embarrassed and then audited. And after hanging their heads in shame, should send checks to the people who made it, and then watch a few movies that did in fact cost 1.3 million dollars and see what real film making, and script writing is. Or go to film school.

2/10 for it's kinda originality and the few moments which did make the adrenaline go but that is it. I walked away feeling rather refreshed than scared or even thrilled. The portrayal of the nurse walking around with bones cracking is the least bit scary and as if it has been taken straight out a Doctor Who episode..... A rip off of Rec. The music is dreadful, so unfitting. Contrapuntal in the wrong way. The sound track is so unsuiting it sounds like something straight out of..... A..... Uhm..... Well I don't know, it's dreadful. It's a modern film so you would have thought it would have been tactfully made using successful features from other good examples of horror films but it hasn't. It seems like the tulle book has been regretfully thrown out of the window..... The saying rules are made to be broken has been completely disproved in this awful film. I'm not too hung up mind you. I bought it for a £1 and a boot market so I will not regret throwing this abomination away.

This movie attempts to be a mockumentary of a paranormal TV show.

Key problems Ghost camera men (where is the camera guy if all footage is "real"?) Extremely clean sets (wasn't this place closed to the public?) Acting lessons (shouldn't a person be able to show emotions to be classified an actor?)

This movie is simply awful, it's so awful that it's laughable which is good because otherwise i wouldn't have been able to sit through it. If you want to see bad then check out this movie, if you want a well done mockumentary of the paranormal then there are plenty of others that do a much better job than this.

And scraping the bottom of the Blair Witch / Paranormal Activity barrel I find this film, grinning idiotically up at me, just waiting to consume 90 minutes of my life.

You know, I admit it, I'm a sucker for these kind of horror films. So I probably deserve it when some celluloid creature like this shambles out of the dark and takes a bite out of me. But, seriously, when someone has an idea for a movie - shouldn't they, you know, kind of flesh it out? Think it through a few times? Am I being too demanding here? "Episode 50" follows two teams of "psychic investigators", one secular and one religious, into one of those "most haunted place on Earth" places (of which there are several hundred or so if you watch these kind of TV shows), in this case an old mental hospital. There's lots of back story concerning the team members, which is constantly being introduced until practically the very last frame of the film. There's lots happening, with each team presenting conflicting reasons for the ghostly goings on.

And there's practically no coherent overall idea of the film.

The flimmakers here want to use the "found footage" format AND have their scary background music too. They want to scare us WITHOUT building up tension. They want to slip in a cute little religious message AND have it taken seriously. Heck, the probably want to lose weight by eating ice cream and get rich buying real estate with no money down.

Mix the half-baked, nearly incoherent film style with some egregiously bad acting and out pops a film that makes "Return to Pontianak" look like "Silence of the Lambs." Seriously, the most horrible thing about this film is that I spent time watching it. Don't make that mistake. Save yourselves!