Super Spooks-Ganza Presents: THE DEAD ROOM

	New Zealand is a beautiful country, with some very pretty landscapes and majestic vistas. It's a very rural sort of place, lots and lots of wilderness with a couple of major cities, like Wellington or Auckland. The Dead Room, my next shitty netflix horror movie I'm reviewing, is a kiwi movie that takes place out in the ass-end of nowhere, which admittedly is one of the prettier ass-ends they can choose for a horror movie. It's also a movie about three ghost hunters fighting one of the most oddly incompetent ghosts...demon..thing, you'll see. Shit's weird, yo.
	It does start off with a sort of prologue, which is to say it's one long panning shot of a cobweb on the ground, with the faint sounds of crying and things getting thrown about in the background, before the title card pops up. I can respect them wanting to keep it succinct, but it's possible to go too hard in the opposite direction and not tell the audience anything about the movie. I have no idea what to expect from this movie due to this, so why have even a short "prologue" in the first place?
	Next comes the basic introductory chapter. Long panning shots over the pretty kiwiland, car driving up to what I'm assuming is the house. Aside from the scenery porn, it does give a sense of isolation-wherever this house is, it's completely removed from even the remotest idea of civilization. Too bad the movie doesn't actually capitalize on the loneliness, eh?
	Characters! There's three of them, and they each get some conversation to introduce each other and establish who they are. It's handled pretty smoothly, even if the people themselves are a bit too archetypical for my tastes. There's Holly, the open-minded occult lady. Scott, the gruff guy that keeps insisting that everything has a scientific, logical explanation. He seems to be the leader. Third fellow is a shrieking ringwraith named Liam, the family man who works with their cameras. Liam seems to be the balancing act with his level-headedness, as much of the movie's conversations are arguments between Holly's psychic mysticism and Scott's grumpy scientific method. While it does set up a nice dynamic for the group, a simple but effective one, at the same time the balancing act does distract quite a bit from the main event, the twelve-foot tall invisible ghost man thing. The debate is an interesting one, yes, but I'm here for spooks, not for deciding if ghosts are to be respected and understood or debunked.
	They set up their stuff. Generator for electricity, EVP stuff, motion-triggered cameras, the works. Take note of the motion-triggered cameras, they play a big role in the movie. Ghost Hunter type deals are pretty basic setups in horror movies. On one hand, it's a handy explanation for people to go actively searching for supernatural nonsense, and as I've mentioned in Demonic there's some neat tricks you can play for spooks with them. On the other, it's almost too convenient, bordering on laziness at times. Unfortunately, Demonic also handled the ghost hunters setup better, too, by pulling out more neat tricks using the technology. There's only so many times seeing the motion camera trigger at seemingly nothing at 3am can be done before it loses its flair, and this movie milks the hell out of that.
	So yeah. 3am, big shudder that shakes the house, camera triggers, front door opens and something big and invisible walks in. There's chandeliers hanging in the main hall the front door is connected too, and seeing them getting knocked around, plus the heavy footsteps does a pretty damn good job at instilling the sense of it being big. The spooksman does this pretty much every night at 3am, and the team realizes this and starts planning accordingly. This movie's strengths aren't in the spook it presents as much as the mystery. What is this big invisible spookermans? Why does it have such a rigid schedule? Why does he refuse to enter the room at the end of the hall, which seems to be a psychic dead zone? While that's enough to keep me intrigued at this point in the game, the downside is this stops being scary after the first couple of nights. Apparently Holly, being the psychic, can see the big spirit dude, and describes it as a large man.
	After a few nights of stuff getting knocked around and them trying to discern more about the big invisible thing, they actually piss it off enough that it attacks them. And, hilariously, the ghost thing proves to be kind of incompetent at it. There's a scene where Holly is backed against a wall, and I guess it just stares at her for two minutes before throwing a punch that's slow enough for her to dodge out of the way. Punches through the wall, yes, but it seemed to be taking a while to make up its mind. The spirit throws stuff, and misses, shoves people around, and misses, and so forth. The only damage it manages to cause is when it shatters a window at them and they get some minor cuts from it. They're still afraid of it, of course, and of course there's the inevitable arguing about whether they should leave or stick around to try and fight it. Holly and Liam want to leave, Scott insists on staying, yada yada yada it's all the same argument we hear in these situations, only with a bit more of a science vs. mysticism bend to it. Really, most of this movie can be summed up that way. It's better ghost hunting than Die Prasenze, but worse than Demonic.
	The fakeout climax on the final night, Holly tries to exorcise it while Scott uses some sonic displacement dubstep cannon on it. That actually seems to kill the beast, and then comes the twist that's actually really cool. After ghostie's supposedly defeated, they find a hidden compartment in that one 'safe' room he wouldn't enter, leading down to another secret basement room that's all locked up, one with cobwebs and bones like we saw at the quick intro shot, so points to Dead Room for actually teasing the twist nicely. The intro shot made zero sense when it came up at first, but this twist shines a new light on it, so kudos. They find another corpse in this evil-ass room, one manacled to a chair and chained to the walls. Huh. So this is that Dead Room the movie was hinting at. Nice.
	They call the cops, who arrive to find the corpse woman gone, and then shit hits the fan. Shit whipping about everywhere, doors slamming and opening, Holly has a seizure, the cops get smashed against the walls. Turns out the ghostieman they had been fighting with was trying to protect them from the even bigger evil monster they just freed. Scott gets thrown into a wall, and I'm guessing that was fatal because we don't see him again after that. Liam gets dragged by a mysterious force down the hole leading to the Dead Room, and as Holly runs out the door a hand yanks her underground. She gets a chain wrapped around her neck, and the last shot of the movie is corpse lady scrambling at the camera on all fours. Granted, none of this sequence was scary, but this is one of the better twists I've seen on netflix horror movies, and I've found myself genuinely interested in it. Sure as hell blows Demonic's twist out of the water.
	The Dead Room isn't bad. It's not scary, but it's at least better made than the lower-end tier of movies like Satanic or Most Likely To Die. I keep comparing it to Demonic because they're pretty much opposities-Demonic has genuine spookers but unlikable characters and an awful twist, whereas Dead Room is interesting, has cool shit in it, but is as scary as a bag of old socks. The debates about mysticism and scientific methods were dumb, but it doesn't try to give some big hopped up explanation about who the corpse woman was-which made her all the more ominous. She's some horrific entity that was trapped away, that's all we know, and whatever origin we guess at is scarier than anything the movie could write. Doesn't help that we never actually see what the big invisible ghostie looks like, which was a shame.