Movie Review: Jessabelle

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Returning to her childhood home in Louisiana to recuperate from a horrific car accident, Jessabelle comes face to face with a long-tormented spirit that has been seeking her return -- and has no intention of letting her escape.

Jessabelle turned out to be a total flop. The plot wasn't very original at all.

The movie started off OK, the tension building slowly along with the atmosphere but it very quickly went downhill. The ghost that began as ominous shadows and creepy occurrences quickly turned into your run of the mill cheap stereotypical ghost. You know the kind -creepy female wearing a dirty white gown, with long scruffy hair hanging over her face and shoulders, sunken eyes- that jumps out of the shadows screaming for that cheap instant scare effect. Apart from the few cheap scares, the movie really had no scare factor at all.

The whole movie was full of clichés and you will pretty much see everything coming. Of course because the movie is set in Louisiana that must mean that all the black people there practice voodoo, don't even get me started on how insulting that is! The actress playing the lead fails massively in expressing the fear during the more tense parts of the movie and I couldn't take her seriously at all. I kept wanting to tell her to close her mouth, she looked more like she was trying to catch flies than act like she was terrified of what was going on.

Even though there was a twist to the ending, it was a predictable twist. I knew what the end result was going to be, just not how it would be executed and the way it was executed was a huge let down in itself.

Not one that I would recommend at all. I recently read Stillwater by Maynard Sims, it has a similar but far more superior and creepy plot and and would have made for a much better movie than this rubbish.

Movie Review - The Atticus Institute

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During the late 1970s, hundreds of cases of psi-related phenomena – E.S.P., clairvoyance, psychokinesis, etc. – were studied at The Atticus Institute, a small psychology lab founded by Dr. Henry West.

After publishing numerous journal articles highlighting the promising results of their work, Dr. West and his fellow researchers were introduced to an unusual middle-age woman named Judith Winstead, whose supernatural abilities tested far beyond any subject they had ever before witnessed. However, it soon became clear that Judith’s abilities were different in ways they could never have anticipated.

Upon learning of Judith, officials from the U.S. Department of Defense were dispatched to The Atticus Institute to observe her, wherein they determined, after strict scientific study, that her physical body was under the control of an unknown malevolent force, thus granting her enormous and nearly unlimited power. This was, and to this day remains, the only government-confirmed case of possession.

        " I don't care who you are,  how many weapons you have.
         All those things that went on... you don't get to play games with the Devil.
         And if you do, you damn sure don't get to make the rules.
         That type of evil... just thinking about it, talking about it.
         Even you people making this movie... and the people watching it... 
         you're inviting bad things into your life.."


This wasn't a bad movie, nothing really new or overly unique about it but there was plenty of creepiness and tension. There was a nice balance between what was shown and what wasn't shown, leaving you to kinda fill in the gaps with your imagination.

It's not your average possession movie, it's done in the style of a documentary, which was a nice change from the hugely overdone found footage. Rya Kihlstedt plays her part, that of the possessed Judith Winstead, very well. The character is all sorts of creepy. Poor Judith as if being possessed by evil isn't bad enough, she ends up at the mercy of the evil of mankind to boot.

The ending was kinda predictable but was good all the same and was worth the watch. Not one I would go out of my way to watch again, but there were times I found myself creeped out and cringing.