Rose McGowan stars as a paranormal debunker out to prove to the world that ghosts don’t exist. Armed with a laptop, a microphone, and her twitter account, she sets out to prove that people only hallucinate ghosts as a result of subsonic frequencies having adverse effects on their brain. This theory has landed her in Canada after receiving an anonymous tip that the closed down section of a train station is haunted. Once she arrives at the abandoned section of the train station, the remainder of the film takes place there, so get comfortable. I can’t confirm her theories about low frequencies but I can tell you this movie had an adverse effect on my brain. This might actually be the dullest, stupidest damn horror movie I have ever seen. Let’s get this over with.
The film started off like it was going to be interesting, with Rose going around debunking haunted places, but we only get to see one instance of this in the opening of the film and then she’s immediately off to the train station, where the film takes a nose dive into an abyss of boring nothingness. The first 15 minutes of the film set it up like it’s going to be an original, interesting story but the remaining hour and 15 minutes just depict her wandering around in the dark, tweeting about headaches and sound frequencies. She does interact with 2 other characters during this period, but one dies off almost immediately and the other is a presumably ghost version of Christopher Lloyd who is underutilized by only depicting him in two scenes where he attempts to change light bulbs.
Apparently the low frequencies in the train station cause her to experience nose bleeds and headaches, and leave her in an almost zombie-like state, which makes for one of the dullest movie experiences I’ve ever witnessed. The lazy, listless manor in which she portrays her character isn’t complimented by the one-note tone in which she says her lines, which seem to only be a million questions – questions she asks with no inflection or emotion, almost like that of a child. (Her presumably Botox-injected face doesn’t help either, as it only makes her face stiff and without expression.) The closest comparison I can make is if you imagine she’s on pain killers – that’s how her character is portrayed. Her cause isn’t helped by the poor attempts at scientific knowledge she dimwittedly claims to be true, like claiming the sounds would be so potent where the tunnels converge that she would be able to record her hallucinations. You cannot record hallucinations, and anyone that thinks you can is an idiot. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out, just someone with mild experience in common sense.
From what I gathered while watching the movie, there seemed to be some kind of underlying plot about a little girl named Emily that we’re led to believe was Rose’s child who died or maybe a little sister that died during childhood, and that today is the anniversary of her death. We’re never revealed how that is related to the train station, but it keeps getting mentioned upon by Rose’s husband and mother between scenes of the train station. In the end, it’s revealed that Emily was never real and apparently Rose was committed to an asylum as a child, so I’m guessing Emily was an imaginary friend of some kind, or maybe a ghost, I can’t tell. The entire thing is very convoluted and bears no weight to the story – unless they’re trying to allude to Rose just being insane and nothing in the train station is actually happening. Even if that is the case, we’re not given any resolution as to what is causing the subsonic frequencies in the train station or what killed the detective, if there even was a detective in the first place. Who knows.
In the end, her husband comes and gets her out of the train station and she vomits a bunch of moths that later flee from the train station and up into the night sky. We’re then shown a scene of Rose in front of her laptop explaining how she now believes in ghosts all of the sudden and that ghosts help us just as much as we help them – ruining all credibility with her readers in this sudden 180 degree stance on the afterlife. She then states she’s retiring from debunking haunted places only to then receive an anonymous message inviting her to investigate someone’s haunted basement, presumably leaving the movie open to a sequel. Please, for the love of all that is good and decent, do NOT make a sequel to this sleep-inducing piece of garbage. The world doesn’t deserve that kind of punishment to be unleashed upon it.
This movie is…
I wouldn’t subject my worst enemy to this crap.
Cheers and goodnight.
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