John Noonan

The Open House

One of the many films desperate for attention on Netflix, The Open House is a limp house invasion film. Directed by Matt Angel, the film sees Logan Wallace (Dylan Minnette, 13 Reasons Why) and his mother, Naomi (Piercey Dalton) housesitting a large manor in the mountains. It slowly – and I do mean, slowly – becomes evident that there’s someone else lurking in the basement.

With all the fast pace action of an iceberg and stacking up the clichés when it should be stacking up the tension, The Open House tries to have its cake and eat it with an ending that is both nihilistic and too little too late.

Paranormal Entity

The main criticism of films nowadays is, ‘We’ve seen it all before’. Often, this happens when a film’s ideas, themes and execution is so old, cave men gave up writing it on the wall. In the case of Paranormal Entity, we have literally seen this all before. A demon terrorises a family for 80 very un-fun minutes before throwing everything at with two minutes of gore, breasts and wobbly camera work.

Hawked out around the same time as Paranormal Activity, there is very little about this film that doesn’t make the whole genre of found footage bow its head and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Inane, derivative and most criminally of all, very, very boring.

Insidious

A family is plunged into tragedy when their son falls into a mysterious coma and they become plagued by paranormal events. Directed by James Wan, Insidious starts off promisingly, before transforming into a party bag of shocks and jolts.

And like a party bag, it’s delicious in small bites but becomes overbearing in one go. It’s also hard to shake the idea that the third act is eerily like the dream world of Drop Dead Fred.