REVIEW OF AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

year: 2014 rating: **

Although many credit the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY franchise  for the handheld video device, it was THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT that put this shaky style on the map… And now we go full circle with AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, where the characters literally run around in circles, often winding up in the same place they started. Basically, the BLAIR WITCH gets lost in the Paris catacombs…

That’s an underground tomb with an abundance of tunnels and skulls… And like in WITCH, our heroine is a bossy know-it-all forcing her reluctant laidback guy/friends to venture deeper into the Gothic maze to learn about, in this case, an eternal life giving “philosopher’s stone”, or something.

Scarlett, played by Perdita Weeks, really does know everything – way too much. Her learned expository hinders the suspense... it's like being in a haunted house with the homeowner as tour guide. Meanwhile, her team of fellow twenty-somethings are introduced decently in the setup, but once the ball gets rolling, the dizzying camera makes all humans an afterthought: when their individual time is up it hardly matters. 

Audiences itching for bombastic horror will get a few neat scream-worthy jolts, yet ABOVE is really a mind-trip experience. Some of the elements…. like a burning car and a broken piano… are too weird/random to be genuinely frightening. The rest seems like chapters in a choose-your-own adventure book. And this one's not written very well, on any level.