Entity (2012)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Sadly Over-hyped

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This is "Entity" with the backwards "N" so not to be confused by other films with the same name. In this film there are no women sexually abused by a ghost. Don't blame me, I didn't write it.This film takes place in remote Sadovich, Siberia, Russia. We get a glimpse of some 1983 footage of a gaunt nude man in a cell with odd things going on, including levitation. We quickly come to the present where a camera crew is going to the same area. They were contacted by Yuri (Branko Tomovic) who claims 34 people were found in a shallow grave in a remote glade. With the help of Ruth (Dervla Kirwan) a psychic, he hopes to find out what happened as the authorities will not say. A camera crew comes along. Kate (Charlotte Riley) is the reporter/director who reminded me of Sandra Bullock. Charlotte Riley is a rising star. Matt (Rupert Hill) is the camera man and David (Oliver Jackson) is the token guy who needs to grow a set. Someone has to be the first to die.Ruth is the real deal. Eleven minutes into the film you have ghosts, no waiting. The full plot, i.e. the function of the building they explore for most of the movie, is explained half way through. The movie is a mixture of found footage and regular filming with the found footage aspect not being too bad except for a poorly shot night scene.The feature starts to get numb as we see much of the same stuff, then when Kate reviews the film...BAM! A nice little twist and surprise ending that made the numb worth while. Definitely worth a view for found footage fans.Parental Guide: F-bomb, male nudity, no sex.

Attempting to uncover a grisly mystery, a documentary team searching for the cause of a mass grave in Russia finds the connection to an abandoned psychiatric institute and tries to get away before the inhabitants point out the same fate.This is a really enjoyable and quite chilling ghost story that has a lot of good points about it. The setting in the abandoned factory gives off an incredibly tense and eerie feeling which works rather well as a setting for such films by generally looking exactly like the type of place where bad things can happen quite easily and certainly looks like the kind of place that would be wholly unnerving when encountered in real life as the cold, lifeless cement and steel structures, endless dimly-or-barely lit corridors and deathly silence that surrounds the entire location is endlessly terrifying before the ghostly actions even start. those are certainly enjoyable enough in their own right as they continually come at such intervals that it never feels like it's dragging on or even all that boring as it stays on course sure enough through the story. Several of these are pretty terrifying as well, with standout encounters in the shock-treatment chamber and into the sleeping chambers which are the biggest ones here but there's enough encounters and interactions so that it's not all that slow-going at all and even feels quite exciting at times. However, it does have a couple of big flaws in that it really doesn't do a lot to help get the most out of it's scares by generally making everything so hard and nearly impossible to see. From shifting camera angles to rapid quick-cut editing and the utterly irritating feature of shooting through a video camera which in-effect resembles the found-footage type of films, there's an endless array about it that really serves to irritate and aggravate about this one which is certainly not the desired effect here when it simply cannot make what goes on that discernible. Without any real sort of violence in here, there's very little in that department to lure anyone in and the film's convoluted storyline in the second half hardly makes any sense at all by throwing in several countless plot-twists that aren't that clever. These drag the film down but it's still good enough when it counts.Rated R: Graphic Language and Violence.

Saw this at the LIFF where it deservedly won Best Horror. The acting is really strong. Will be watching Charlotte Riley's future with interest. I hear she has already landed a lead female starring role opposite Tom Cruise. I feel the director has given a masterclass in making a low budget film look anything but. I enjoyed the psychological horror as am not a great fan of gore. Not as many jumps as the Paranormal Activity series. This stuck with me for some time afterwards like The Blair Witch Project did and provoked me to scurry off to google to research into the historical background given as fact in the film and whether it was based on stuff that really happened in The Cold War. For me this adds to the scare factor. The sound was impressively frightening and in the peaks of the film I had my hands over my ears and squinting through my eyes. Win for me.

I love scary movies and this was very scary! lots of jumps and the people in the film actually did sensible things which was a nice change. Acting is great - the main documentary girl looked really sincerely freaked out when all the bad things happened. I have no idea why this is rated so low, maybe people have been brainwashed into thinking a simple storyline in a freaky empty building in the middle of the Siberian forest is not complicated enough for a horror film?So if you like scary films that have normal people in them just getting into horrific situations through no real fault of their own, I recommend this film. Scary good.