Haiku Revu: The Possession

23 May 2013 - Nic Ho Chee

"Box contains small parts",
Hebrew label reads, parent
Spidey sense faulty.

A divorced father buys one of his two estranged daughters a creepy wooden box with Hebrew carvings at a yard sale somewhere in the States. Unable to open the container and assuming it to be some sort of puzzle box, Daughter B returns with it to her Dad's new house to examine later. As the night wears on a strange buzzing voice emanates from the invidious old crate whispering dark messages to the child, who rather than run screaming from the room is tempted into unlocking it. An odd combination of insect corpse, tooth and ring, which would seem more at home in a Sam and Max game, fall out. By opening the box and taking the arcane bric-a-brac poor Daughter B's soul is forfeit as the entity previously contained can now slowly merge with her. Cue a once golden child becoming steadily more feral and malicious as the ill-omened Father battles to understand what is happening and save her from a descent to full demon-hood.

This was the last of the films at Frightfest 2012 we managed to catch, and is also the last to be Haiku Revu'd from that gloriously macabre weekend. We saw the trailer to this in our Frightfest warmup and were looking forward to it as one of the possible highlights of the festival. I can honestly say we would have been better off to skip the promo video as it acted like a cast iron spoiler which singularly stripped all the best scares in the film and painted them onto our unsuspecting retinas to dull the later experience of actually seeing the movie. There is undoubtedly some above par acting and eerie moments contained herein, but there is too much standard fare to stitch together the few truly scary events which were already pushed in the trailer. There are many more recent demonic possession movies which are better deserving of your time. For example check out The Last Exorcism which concentrated on developing the cast to the point that you were invested in their survival, or the first Paranormal Activity which surfaced some downright ghastly and ghostly moments.

Even though this was produced by Sam Raimi it was still found lacking, I'm giving it a very disappointing no thumbs up award. If you don't watch the trailer or many horror movies, it might be worth catching, but so many more out there that surpass this one.