The Haunting of Fox Hollow Farm (2011)

THE HAUNTING OF FOX HOLLOW FARM is another amateurish 'paranormal investigation' indie effort in which a bunch of amateur researchers head off to a remote farmhouse that once belonged to a serial killer. They proceed to do their research, conduct interviews, and generally tread water until the credits roll. There's also a lot of the usual night-vision camera shooting which reveals very little. This film is both predictable and routine.

Advertised as a documentary this is an hour long feature about real life killer Herb Baumeister.The first half gives you a background of Baumeister and the murders committed, the second turns to a night vision filled paranormal investigation much like Most Haunted (2002).The trouble is I don't believe any of it. Though it's supposed to be a real documentary it all felt very contrived. And the second half, well alike Most Haunted I believe it's a combination of fake & desperation.I simply couldn't take this seriously as a documentary and from a movie standpoint it's not even on the scale.Boring, lifeless, faux documentary about subject matter that deserves real attention.The Good: Based on an interesting true story The Bad: Many interview segments are repeated I doubt every single seconds authenticity More ghost hunter nonsense Things I Learnt From This Movie: Native American Shamans also come in white

I don't say that lightly, and I've watched thousands and thousands of movies, good and bad. I'm a frequent buyer of those 20-movies-for-$5 packs and actually like a lot of them, so I grade them pretty easy -- I'm not expecting Kurosawa out of a film like this, so I'm very lenient.But, damn, dude.This was so badly made I don't see how anyone did it without *applying* themselves to screwing it up. The editing is completely and utterly incompetent. I cannot think of any editing that's worse. It is, literally, like watching a TV whose remote is in the hands of a cranked-up channel surfer with a half-second attention span. And it's frustrating because the material itself was interesting... it's just completely ruined by the editing technique. All the flow of the narrative is destroyed. Stories are joined and left mid-sentence to go to part of a line from another story. Half the time we aren't given a clue as to who the person talking is or what they're referring to. Segments -- most of them irrelevant in the first place -- are repeated over and over like sampling in a rap song. Information about the serial killer is intercut with ghost-hunting stuff, wrecking the narrative flow of both.It's like trying to read a book while someone constantly yanks it out of your hands.After watching the whole thing I still have very little idea about what this serial killer actually did, or what "haunting" events led these ghost hunters to investigate the place (other than one sighting of a "guy in a red shirt with no legs" - that's looped a few times). The viewer is simply not given sufficient information on anything.And the ghost-hunters are goofy, trying to scare themselves with a lot of "did you hear that?" b.s., jumping at every shadow and trying to pretend there are words in the EVP nonsense. (I've gone on Halloween expeditions with "real" ghost-hunters before, and they're hilarious about trying to make something out of EVP static, so this is not unique just to this film). Nothing really happens, and it's not "spooky" at all. A narrator comes in with some clumsy poetry to try to make it seem profound, but... nothing freaking happened, dude. NOTHING.I was more than willing to play along in hopes of some scares. I watch A Haunting, which covers similar stories (and for a similar budget - man, that's a cheap show), and it's hokey but it's entertaining. It's not the budget's fault. I'm not sure about the source material -- maybe there's not much to the Fox Hollow story to begin with -- but I wanted to be interested in it. Unfortunately, this film gives the situation no reason to be spooky, because it hasn't provided the viewer with any real background info or solid story to follow, just half-snippets that may have been leading somewhere before, oops, we cut away from them again because that person was talking for more than two seconds and Mr. Hall just couldn't stand it. There'll suddenly be stuff about "we found the body on the beach..." and then, zap, we're off to something else before we find out what body, who they were, how they were killed, ANYTHING.The editing makes me wonder if Dan T. Hall has ever actually SEEN a movie or even heard a story. It's like someone took him off a desert island where he was born, gave him a basic description of what editing is - i.e. "putting segments of video together" -- and he just said, "Oh, yeah, I can do that!" and then went at it with all the fury of attention-deficit-disorder driving him. You literally could toss film into a blender, chop it up, then tape it back together in the dark and have a better chance at creating something coherent. It's like watching a toddler play with a light switch for an hour.I'm bewildered by this thing. I wasn't exactly bored (fortunately it's only a little over an hour), but was amazed by how poorly it was made. There are no filmmaking instincts on display here at all, I mean, not even rudimentary. I have to wonder if it's not some prank on us, some "you people are idiots, so here, I bet you'll even sit through this" act of spite.If you're ever going to make a documentary, please watch this one first, and then don't do *anything* the way it's done here.

The Haunting was very much in the style of those paranormal investigator type/haunted building shows on Discovery, although it felt as if they tried a little too hard to simulate that experience. . The pacing dragged a bit, and the constant cuts were aggravating to say the least. Especially when it was evident that nothing was going on to justify such an editing technique. If they didn't go so over the top with the editing and adding creepy sound effects or manipulating voices this could have been a solid documentary but those elements really detracted from the film overall. Luckily the story was engaging enough to justify sitting through the whole thing and the testimonies that witnesses and experts told were pretty fascinating to hear. I just wish they didn't try so hard with some of the edits.