The St. Francisville Experiment doesn't even come close to matching its inspiration, playing instead like an episode of The World's Scariest Places with the boring parts left in. It either can't or won't rely on a Blair Witch-style creepiness for very long, so each sequence of tension--and there are a couple good ones--end in a "shock." The inclusion of these "jumps" is done so deliberately as to almost seem obligatory, and they ruin the tension. One such "jump" was effective (liked the chair, folks--it worked), but others were just silly. (Shackles? Come on.)

This film is blunt where Blair was subtle, doesn't always stick to its conceit of "realism," and if the characters in Blair Witch irritated you, stay far away from this one. The acting isn't convincing--a good deal of it is terrible, frankly--and some of the improvisation is repetitive to the point of being annoying. Ryan Larson easily comes off the best--she makes her character seem like there's something going on in her head and tries to lend motivation to some of her actions. She's also apparently the person that's most consistently affected by the haunting. For example, watch how her shirt changes position, sometimes baring her midriff (thereby accentuating her not inconsiderable chest, surely an intended selling point of the film), sometimes not. This sometimes happens from one shot to the next--surely no human could have been behind so fast a movement. The two men are interchangeable, and Madison Charap, as a psychic, is annoying. Really, really annoying. As I've seen in many documentaries on hauntings, some psychics and mediums are closeted narcissists who use their perceived power (or make one up) in order to feel important and gain attention. The film, or Charap, may be using her character to develop that subtext, but it's also definitely possible that I'm just making things deeper than they really are. Actually, the very presence of the characters in the house is ridiculous. They're all people in their early twenties, qualified to do nothing, yet they're entrusted with all this equipment and responsibility? Hans Holzer, they ain't. I'd almost feel better if the film had had some kind of twist ending revealing the whole thing to be a twisted psychological experiment. No luck.

This film could have been one of my worst nightmares come true. I don't know why--is it something from my past that I've forgotten? something merely innate?--but the idea of spending a night in a dark haunted house with little more than the light of a flashlight scares the living shit out of me. Scares me beyond all reason. At times, St. Francisville stabbed me right in that weak spot, but more often than that, it just brushed past it. Or missed it entirely. So much opportunities, so many opportunities lost.

But now, back to the story. The first thirty minutes are slow and kind of boring. The movie gets a little better when the characters start exploring the house, though the acting in this part is sometimes good and at other times total crap. There are some good scares in the second half of the movie. The end is a bit disappointing, after the good last twenty minutes. They try to end the film with a shocker like in BWP, but it doesn't really convince and is a little abrupt. In addition, the audience is left with some questions that could've easily been answered to make the movie a little more believeable.