Project Terrible: The Chair

Back for more, Michele?  Since I stick to a 5-movie-a-week review schedule, I give every member of the challenge one more possibly opportunity to wreck me emotionally.  Since I did not want to do Taintlight or a film about Vincent Gallo, I decided to do the offering by The Girl Who Loves Horror.  Her choice- The Chair.  This low-budget horror film is all about mixing magic with pseudo-science and really slow pacing.  If you like real drama, there's not much to be found.  If you like logical plotting, there's not much to be found.  If you like seeing an anorexic actress try to be menacing and evil, there's plenty of that!  The story involves a new homeowner who discovers that her house was the site of a weird experiment 100 years ago.  The result: random ghost action!  Seriously, she gets molested by a ghost...or something at one point in the movie.  You don't really care about that though.  You want to know if it's Terrible or not.  To find out, read on...

Our heroine is given a nice house to live in, just to see if she can live alone.  You see, she's had some mental troubles in the past.  Naturally, she gets the house that's haunted by an evil ghost.  Why don't assholes get those houses instead of nice families or the mentally-disturbed?!?

In a set-up that would become much more common in the years to come, she tapes herself while she sleeps to check for ghost activity.  I question why she thinks that ghosts will appear on camera, but stuff actually happens.  Score one for the mentally-ill!

Now, here's the problem: this movie wants to have its cake and eat it too.  It alternates between scenes of crazy shit happening (albeit on a small scale) and scenes of the older sister thinking that her sister is crazy.  You want us to think that the girl is crazy?  We see all of the stuff that happens!

All you're doing is wasting our time!

After about forty-five minutes into this movie with nothing of note really happening, I had to ask myself a question.  Is this worth it?  Let's zoom ahead to a later shot to see...

No, I don't think so.  No good will come of this.  If you really want to know what happens, watch it yourself. The End.

You pay for the whole seat, but will only use the Exit!  The plot of this movie could have been good.  The problem is that it doesn't quite know what to do.  Here's how you salvage this movie.  Have the formerly-crazy girl move into the house and act disturbed.  She is constantly calling her sister and telling her what happened (rather than us seeing it).  She gets more and more disturbed, becoming obsessed with the house's legend and the video from the website.  Side-note: who has the free-time to put up a 100 year-old video of this guy doing an experiment?  Plus, how did they get it?  As far as I know, the film never answers this.  They just do!  Back to my plot, she gets more disturbed and leads into the events of the film's climax.  In that light, the silly stuff (possession, the chair experiment, etc) is more sinister and, gasp, interesting.  The actual version is silly, full of holes and has a ridiculous twist ending.  Does it make me want to see more?  No.  So far, this is the closest thing to a Terrible film I've done in this Round.  I've still got James Nguyen coming, so we'll see if that overshadows this. Be afraid...

Next up, Austria's own Maynard Morrisey challenges me to watch one-third of Night Train to Terror.  The scary part- Richard Moll with hair!  Stay tuned...