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POLTERGEIST ENCOUNTERS (2016)

Directed by John Migliore
Written by John Migliore
Starring Andre Guantanamo, Rachél Hopkins, Matt Bandura, John Migliore, Deborah Jayne Reilly Smith, Lena Montecalvo, Mike Trebilcock, Simon Wheeldon, Sabrina Migliore, Nicholas Migliore

I don’t even want to get into dissecting this via my found footage questionnaire as the test is meant to basically measure the realism of the footage taken in the film. In my opinion, making the found footage film feel authentic is the most important thing a film of this sort should try to achieve and if you don’t have the energy or creativity to even try to pull that off, why even go this route with your film?

POLTERGEIST ENCOUNTERS follows a team of ghosthunters who are offered a large sum of money to simply stay the night in the house. It’s not really explained why they would be paid or what they are trying to prove by investigating or what they should do if they do find paranormal happenings. Then again, in most ghosthunting shows, they are never very specific in what they will do if spooks or specters are found, so I guess I can give the film a pass for that.

The biggest offense of this film is that it simply has no interest in trying to sustain the disbelief that what we are watching is real. It incorporates music when no music should exist in the scene. The action sometimes happens as caught through the camera. Other times, there’s an unseen camera man just filming stuff. Somehow all of this is edited together and while there are survivors in the night in the haunted home, there is no way the character would want to edit these scenes together as they are extremely incriminating. In the end, this is just a film that sometimes uses taped footage, sometimes doesn’t, and sometimes makes no sense at all.

There is a throughway story. It’s not well written or developed and gets rather convoluted by the end in a futile attempt to add some kind of twist. The acting is below subpar, never reaching the depth required from the script. There are no scares to speak of or any ambience or environmental creepiness, just people walking in the dark and occasionally meeting doppelgangers of themselves. And the effects budget is nil. I hate to be so down on such a film, but I really am struggling to find anything I liked about POLTERGEIST ENCOUNTERS. So how about I just end the review here and quit wasting all of our time?

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