This
app is really a piece of supernatural malware. Using it is risky under any circumstances,
but the ill effects are exacerbated by human nature and human stupidity. Following
it to a place like Preston School of Industry (a.k.a. Preston Castle), possibly
the most notorious reform school in America is obviously a bad idea.
Nevertheless, that is the premise of Wayman Boone’s Apparition, which
concludes its “excuse me” theatrical engagement tonight in Brooklyn.
In
real life, Preston was pretty bad, but former wards like Merle Haggard, Neal
Cassady, and Edward Bunker lived to talk about it (clearly, it was not very
effective in the case of the latter). However, it is hard to believe guards would
actually use cigar-cutters to snip off kids’ fingers, as we see in the film’s
second nasty prologue. (Yes, it takes forever to get to the primary narrative
strand.)
Eventually,
we reach the contemporary timeline. At which point, the nice girl Skylar King
is marrying evil Warden White’s obnoxious son Derek, for reasons neither of
them really understands. On the night of the rehearsal dinner, they start messing
around with an app created by Derek’s way-on-the-spectrum brother Sam that
creates a connection to the spirit realm. Supposedly, he downloaded some
material from the dark web, but there is no serious attempt to explain how it
works.
Regardless,
Taylor, the daughter of one of White’s deputies, uses it first, to reach her
late grandmother, in a deceptively benign encounter. Skyler tries it next—and off
they go to the abandoned Preston Castle, with her embittered fiancé griping and
moaning the whole way. Fortunately, the vengeful spirits will shut him up. We
could watch him get killed several times over, but the Skyler’s companions are
rock-stupid but weirdly likable, so they really don’t seem to deserve what’s in
store for them.
Apparition
goes
from being bad in an absolutely appalling way, to being bad in a meat-headed,
ham-fisted kind of way. Screenwriters Rob Rose, Boone, Mark S. Allen, and
Howard Burd sound like they are going for intentional unintentional humor when
they have their characters say things like, “what’s the worst that could
happen.”
So,
when Kevin Pollak looks back on his career, he probably will not rank playing
Warden White alongside his roles in Mrs. Maisel, A Few Good Men, and The
Usual Suspects. He is not exactly a natural big-screen heavy, but he manages
to project some fierceness, probably by channeling all his frustration with his
agent for getting him into this gig. (Where’s Susie Myerson when you need her?)
Honestly, Megan West and Jason Woods give the film more energy than it deserves
as the tag-alongs, Taylor and Nate. On the other hand, Annalisa Cochrane’s
Skyler and Matthew Barnes’ Derek are pretty bland, but we can definitely
believe their dislike for each other.
Easily
the best thing about Apparition is the creepy old Preston Castle, but it
is not the first horror movie to use it as a setting, so you can’t give it
credit for originality in that respect. One of the last releases of 2019 and
probably one of the least, Apparition concludes (most likely) its
theatrical run tonight (1/2) in Brooklyn, at the Kent Theater (and its already
available on iTunes).
