Good concept, poorly executed.

Boring, long, and too preachy.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Average horror movie regarding a paranormal investigator who is assessing a house for supernatural activity. Due to the title, you know what happens to her in the end. It is done as a documentary style film, so it almost resembles found footage. The movie is more spooky than scary.The genre has been done to death and there are many better movies out there about ghost hunters. This one, however, isn't too bad and was a little better than I expected. Parts of it are really creepy.There are some issues with bad acting here and there and at times the dialog seemed a little silly, but overall it was certainly watchable and generally held my interest. Most of the actors did okay with their roles with the exception of the father. I also had a hard time with the casting of the church girl - I didn't find her believable at all. She did okay with what she was given, but I wish they had cast someone who didn't look so hardened.Because the writer wants you to believe this is a documentary (it isn't), night vision film is used sporadically - it shows as green and is common in these types of movies. If you have ever seen shows about paranormal investigations, you'll know what I'm talking about. Part of the film also concerns the investigator's journal entries which might run some folk's nerves.The movie runs at 1:45 so it is longer than most. As other reviewers have said, I think it could have been cut by at least 15 minutes and still told the story it wanted to tell. The back story of what actually happened in the house occurs towards the end of the movie so most of the loose ends are tied.Finally, this isn't a splatter or CGI film, so if that's your thing, you might want to skip it. Otherwise, its just okay - not great, but not bad.

I do not know where the low ratings are coming from. Perhaps from members of the religious group which is put in a bad light in the movie itself. The acting is not at all bad. Lindsay Page who plays a very important role as a investigation-crashing fundamentalist is excellent. She came across as very realistic. I am surprised she hasn't appeared in more films. The other actors where also playing people who are not actors. Not a easy role to play. Our ghost hunter and the videographer are realistic enough so as not to interfere with my sense of being in the world the movie spins. The journalist might have been a bit over the top in places. At other times she did fine. One thing that could have been better is the choreography of a fight scene. But it was not so terrible as to be completely unconvincing. This is more a movie for fans of ghost hunting shows than for fans of scary movies. That said the script is very good. The plot is not at all boring. I recommend it.

Overall, the film did decently with setting up an atmosphere.I do have a few points of critique: 1. Very repetitive background music. Those notes on the piano ended up bugging me a lot, since they were in every scary scene.2. Other sound issues - some scenes very obviously had all sound cut, the film could've used a "noise" track so these scenes wouldn't stand out so much. There was *some* nice music scores, but I feel that starting them out at a lower volume (and keeping them lower) would've drawn less attention to them.3. Some sequences - particularly the end - could've been shortened down a bit. With the fluff overall, I'd say the film could easily have been 20 minutes (and maybe even 30 minutes, if you're good at killing your darlings) shorter.Overall, I'd say the film shows some nice ideas, and at times a good execution of said ideas.

I hate to say that this was a really bad movie, because I like to think there is a gem in every bad horror flick and especially because I already spent nearly two hours watching it, but this was really a bad movie on multiple fronts.My biggest problem: story development. Closely followed by my second biggest problem: unbelievably long. Which was exacerbated by my other problems: badddd acting, bad scriptSee, the bad acting and bad script are forgivable for about the first hour when I still had hope that the story might be worth a d^mn. And I'm an incredibly patient person, so when I turned on the time remaining and saw that after an hour and a half I still had twenty minutes left(!) I thought my head might explode. Compound that with the fact that by that point I STILL had no idea how this whole story came together (many people have complained about predictability, but I'm going to have to go the other way. So much was left until the horrible 'recap' moment at the end, I had no f^cking clue what was going on. I'd thought that somehow the movie makers had forgotten about the drowned baby?! (Pulling a Paranormal Entity, you can't predict the end if you've been given false information at the beginning!) But the story, ultimately, is what is making my head throb at this very moment. A poorly made movie with low budget effects can be saved by an interesting story. Unfortunately, I don't find completely unbelievable Christian psycho-zealots interesting or believable. I don't say that because I'm a devout Christian or because I don't believe there are insane people out there, but because there is NO way in our society that what was supposedly transpiring at the Masterson household would go for twenty years undiscovered. You're telling me that police didn't find the freshly buried grave of Miranda? You're telling me the cop didn't report the nearly drowned infant, at which point anyone who KNEW the family would say, 'well they didn't have a baby?!' You're telling me that out of the fifteen odd photos of girls that had been abused in this fashion that NO ONE ever came forward? You're telling me that the police did no investigation into the murders and took the wife's suicide note word for it, 'look, I know my prints are on the murder weapon, but I totally didn't do this'? This story at its most basic level, sucks. Everyone out there who is so excited about the story must have just totally nutted over the Amityville horror (also stupid). Mix into that the fact that we have to deal with the stereotypical aggressive Christian girl who is obviously NOT supposed to be there for at least an hour and by god I might strap a black box onto my head and start killing people!Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. And the 'paranormal activity' in the house wasn't even that scary! Totally overdone and not threatening at all! Get me the Tylenol!