A Casa dos Espíritos

Are we not going to talk about that hairline? Did it slip everyone's mind. I couldn't take him seriously lol

Terrible. Especially the young actors (Hunter Alexes Parker and Mason Parker) and the dad (Matt Holbrook). Lara Jean Mummert did pretty well, but she is too much of a stage and theater actor to work well on screen.

In the actors' defense, the writing can take a lot of the blame for the disjointed and unnatural dialogue. No one says things like, "looking...right at myself." Or, "...without knowing the background of it." I know Batista was born in the DR but no one proofread the work at all to remove any rigidity or colloquial missteps.

The moment I saw Charles what's his name in this I knew it was going to be terrible. The last movie I saw him in, he played a psychologist that took his patients to a cabin for the weekend and someone was killing them off. That movie was bad. This is worse.

Let's start with the production. I had to check several times to make sure this wasn't a dub. The dialogue never seemed to match up with the lip movement. It also had the sound quality of those dubbed European shows on Netflix. But, alas, it was made in America and the actors were American.

Next is the actors. I guess acting school/lessons is a thing of the past. No one had any presence at all. The girl telling the story was so droll I wished I was deaf. The father spoke like he didn't know how to construct sentences. And the mother just whined the whole time. There was also a son and daughter, but like I said, had no presence and I dismissed them easily. Then there's the pastor. Just why? He was so over the top yet underwhelming at the same time I had to rewind a few times.

The ending was not a shocker. I figured it out in the first 5 minutes of the film. If you need to put someone to sleep, this film will do it for you.

Even if I don't like a movie. But. This is the dumbest movie I've seen in a while. The acting is laughable. The writing is laughable. I would have laughed throughout except I think it was meant to be taken seriously. It had the potential to be scary but fell so short because the writing and acting was horrible. It's a shame because I really think they meant to make a legitimately scary movie.

There's really no foothold to gain in order to redeem this film; none other than watching it for a laugh. Bad cinematography, bad editing, bad acting (the male character above all others) and what's more important, bad storytelling. The scenes with the priest were the ones where we laughed more hysterically: the one where the guy budges around as if he was annoyed by a mosquito rather than a demon takes the cake. (MEMO: bring insecticide rather than holy water next time.) Oh, don't forget to take a look at the fake 10 star reviews here on IMDb for an additional laugh.