Beyond Paranormal
A horror/sci-fi flick that can't quite decide if it wants to be kooky, scary or naughty and ends up being none of them.
There’s a great line early on in “Beyond Paranormal” about the relatively new genre of found-footage scary movies: how come when they find the footage, it’s already conveniently edited and ready to play?
A nice guffaw from this movie, acknowledging its ancestry going back to the (now) great granddaddy of found footage, “The Blair Witch Project,” of which all these are its (often disappointing) children. But that was the high point for the flick.
The movie can't quite decide if it wants to be kooky, scary or naughty — and ends up being none of them.
Cortney Palm plays Lilly, an aspiring actress who has heretofore squeaked by as a webcam influencer in geek culture. She’s known as “Box Girl Lilly” for her sex-kittenish videos where she “unboxes” or opens up cool new stuff to show it off, and in case you’re wondering — yes, this is actually a thing, and not just for lonely incels.
She’s hired by a sleazy filmmaker (Oliver Cooper) to spend a week in his house filming herself for a FF horror movie where she’s stalked by ancient forces dating back to Inca times, when a princess and her priest/lover (Nikki Howard and Anthony Cruz) were hunted down for their forbidden love.
Slowly the backstory begins to overpower the movie-making, until we’re unsure what’s real and what’s showbiz razzle-dazzle.
Erick Nathan and Clint Howard make appearances as a conspiracy podcast host and his big-brain guest, who show up to speechify about the plausibility of time travel and provide largely unnecessary exposition. Patricia Rae plays Angela, a medium Lilly hires to do usual medium-things like hold a seance and tell fortunes.
The other main character is Ray (Ryan Donowho), Lilly’s writer lump of a boyfriend, who is reluctantly brought along for the film shoot, hoping to use the downtime to finish his novel. But he starts having nightmares and visions in which the ancient princess has come back to steal his seed.
(Filmmakers: stop with this trope. Dudes’ seed is not exactly a rare commodity that’s hard to come by… pun fully intended.)
Written and directed by Matteo Ribaudo, “Beyond Paranormal” has a weird couple dynamic going on. Lilly is a bit of an exhibitionist who enjoys showing off her body for the cameras, wearing varying amounts of clothing from little to none. She’s also constantly trying to get Ray to have sex with her, who’s ambivalent about it at best — even when she whips out the whips and rubber.
The camera spends a lot of time leering over Palm’s lithe, tattooed body which, a little bit of wayward Googling later, I learn she is not shy about displaying in her own life and career. I couldn’t grasp the disconnect of the film working so hard to make Lilly seem so desirable and then having Ray harbor seemingly zero desire for her.
The movie has a few cool scenes, like one where Lilly meditates on the deck and is overtaken by the ancient evil, resulting in a flood of birds diving in bloody splats into the window. But overall it’s overlong and slow-moving, the sort of thing that gives you an itchy feeling… but doesn’t scratch it.