THE GANZFELD POSSESSION

I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHETHER THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS OR NOT

In which a bunch of despicable imbeciles get violently drunk, take enough drugs to sink a battleship and bellow endless gibberish to the extent that you just want them all to die rather than be forced to sit through any more of their incoherent babblings and hallucinations. (The film does oblige, in part, but it takes its own sweet time about it.) It's honestly one of those movies that makes you seriously question your commitment to horror movies, because if this is the level of garbage the genre has plummeted to then it's probably time to switch to Adam Sandler romcoms. Or give up entirely and take up watercolours or Morris dancing instead. Life is too short to waste on this kind of rubbish.

Four students show up at a creepy old house to carry out experiments in thought transference using the (genuine) Ganzfeld techniques of sensory deprivation. Within minutes of The Ganzfeld Possession's opening credits they've decided to knock the class assignment on the head and party, snorting about a million dollars' worth of cocaine with an enthusiasm unseen since Tony Montana in Scarface and washing it down with a veritable lake of neat whisky. Then they're hearing noises, they're seeing ghosts, they try the experiments again to find out what may or may not have happened in the house years before. Is the place haunted? Might one or more of the group have a terrible, long-forgotten secret? Or are they all just thoroughly wasted and imagining it all in their coke and booze-addled brains?

It's impossible to give much of a toss, really. All four are painfully stupid even before they break open the narcotics and utterly intolerable when they're reduced to hopeless tripping morons. ("Reduced" may not be entirely the right word here.) The film is directed by Michael Oblowitz, and it's actually a massive comedown even from his brace of mediocre second-string Steven Seagal quickies (let alone more interesting films like This World, Then The Fireworks, or the vampire movie The Breed). Frankly I'm wondering if my love of horror movies can survive this level of punishment.

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