Four students are working on their final psychology project for class. They are Becket (apparently a girl's name)- the nerdy girl, Eliot- the nerdy guy in charge of the technology, Graves- a jerk, and Lucky- a girl jerk who thinks she's hot but isn't. They chose to do a parapsychological Ganzfeld experiment in an old abandoned house with a furnace problem that belongs to Becket's family. In the Ganzfeld experiment as performed by them, a receiver is placed in a room with a red light wearing white goggles and headphones that play white noise. In another room is the sender and everyone else. Pictures of playing cards are randomly presented on a screen, the sender articulates the kind of card and tries to send the image of the card mentally to the receiver who is then supposed to receive the communication telepathically and make it become visible on screens in the other room.
For the first 30 minutes these people just bicker and give each other a hard time. Lucky immediately pulls out a bag of cocaine and she and Graves do nothing but snort it. Initially not much happens with the experiment, but then Graves as a receiver sees and hears his father, and also some little girl. Next Becket takes the seat as a receiver and she starts seeing and hearing all sorts of nasty things including a murder, she writes down the word "sisters" on a paper and it freaks out everybody because they are seeing the images on screen. She calls her mom to confirm that she doesn't have any sister because now she has a feeling that the girl that's appearing is her sister indeed. The mom confirms she has no sisters but isn't very convincing.
At this point most movies would have continued in this vein, with things going downhill and becoming bloody. Instead here, now with everybody freaked out they start drinking, smoking pot, doing coke. Becket and Eliot lose their inhibitions and she starts fooling around with Lucky in a fairly erotic scene, which could be even hotter had they cast someone else as Lucky. But when things are getting interesting, the creepy girl interrupts things. Again everybody freaks out. They do more drugs. Becket finally hooks up with Eliot. She then goes back to the receiver room and sees a revelation. Turns out that these 4 were friends as kids already. Well, there were 5 if we include Becket's sister who was murdered. And the surprise is who killed her and why. Naturally she flips out. In the morning the cops arrive.
By the reviews and scores on IMDb you would think this movie is the worst. And things don't start out well. There are some editing problems initially and I just can't stand watching a group of people confined in a small space screaming at each other. But it manages to turn itself around and improve. Granted, to make use of time they give us tons of repetitive scenes of the kids taking cocaine. They should have focused a bit more on the girl, and the childhood scenes instead. Acting is good all around. Taylor Cole is lovely and it's great to see her in a sexy role. Direction is very good. This movie could easily have been a complete disaster. Movies that stick just to people going crazy without any interesting reality outside their minds make for awful movies. But the fact that it goes beyond just the madness and gives us some reality, namely the lives of them as kids and the murder years ago makes it far more interesting. Some questions remain after it's all over. And usually that doesn't work for me. But here it does because it's not like we are given no explanation for what happened, instead we get several possible explanations or a combinations of them. Was it the drugs, was it a gas leak, both perhaps that account for what happened? This movie got me involved, starting with the erotic scenes and even the psychological aspect was very well done. The movie looks and sounds very good. While it does have the usual jarring sounds and editing at times, they could have gone with the usual bleak gray/blue look as so many do, instead they went with natural saturated colors which don't remove the audience but involves it instead. Overall this movie is a success despite what others here claim.
For the first 30 minutes these people just bicker and give each other a hard time. Lucky immediately pulls out a bag of cocaine and she and Graves do nothing but snort it. Initially not much happens with the experiment, but then Graves as a receiver sees and hears his father, and also some little girl. Next Becket takes the seat as a receiver and she starts seeing and hearing all sorts of nasty things including a murder, she writes down the word "sisters" on a paper and it freaks out everybody because they are seeing the images on screen. She calls her mom to confirm that she doesn't have any sister because now she has a feeling that the girl that's appearing is her sister indeed. The mom confirms she has no sisters but isn't very convincing.
At this point most movies would have continued in this vein, with things going downhill and becoming bloody. Instead here, now with everybody freaked out they start drinking, smoking pot, doing coke. Becket and Eliot lose their inhibitions and she starts fooling around with Lucky in a fairly erotic scene, which could be even hotter had they cast someone else as Lucky. But when things are getting interesting, the creepy girl interrupts things. Again everybody freaks out. They do more drugs. Becket finally hooks up with Eliot. She then goes back to the receiver room and sees a revelation. Turns out that these 4 were friends as kids already. Well, there were 5 if we include Becket's sister who was murdered. And the surprise is who killed her and why. Naturally she flips out. In the morning the cops arrive.
By the reviews and scores on IMDb you would think this movie is the worst. And things don't start out well. There are some editing problems initially and I just can't stand watching a group of people confined in a small space screaming at each other. But it manages to turn itself around and improve. Granted, to make use of time they give us tons of repetitive scenes of the kids taking cocaine. They should have focused a bit more on the girl, and the childhood scenes instead. Acting is good all around. Taylor Cole is lovely and it's great to see her in a sexy role. Direction is very good. This movie could easily have been a complete disaster. Movies that stick just to people going crazy without any interesting reality outside their minds make for awful movies. But the fact that it goes beyond just the madness and gives us some reality, namely the lives of them as kids and the murder years ago makes it far more interesting. Some questions remain after it's all over. And usually that doesn't work for me. But here it does because it's not like we are given no explanation for what happened, instead we get several possible explanations or a combinations of them. Was it the drugs, was it a gas leak, both perhaps that account for what happened? This movie got me involved, starting with the erotic scenes and even the psychological aspect was very well done. The movie looks and sounds very good. While it does have the usual jarring sounds and editing at times, they could have gone with the usual bleak gray/blue look as so many do, instead they went with natural saturated colors which don't remove the audience but involves it instead. Overall this movie is a success despite what others here claim.