These five medical students have volunteered to take part in an experiment conducted by one of their professors, and when he ties them to their seats they treat it as a joke at first. But the academic appears perfectly serious when he produces a scalpel and cuts into the wrist of José (Maxi Iglesias), draining the blood from the wound into a dish by his chair. His fellow students are horrified and begin to panic as the professor assures them they should be calm, especially José since if he can use his mind to stop the bleeding it will be a big step towards passing his exams next week. As the man passes out, the professor reveals it was a trick, and Angela (Amaia Salamanca) is most aggrieved...
As the title suggests, Paranormal Xperience 3D was shot in three dimensions, a Spanish cash-in on the newfound liking filmmakers had for the gimmickier end of the cinema spectrum, though the results in this case were not exactly a worldwide blockbuster success. Most audiences, such as they were, were unimpressed by what they regarded as a European attempt to capitalise on the Hollywood style of then-recent horror fads from out of that market, combining a spot of so-called torture porn with the interest in the spirit world to conjure their thrills. Except here we were left wondering throughout whether the menace was indeed hailing from the afterworld or if there was a more corporeal reason for it all.
To that end, director Sergi Vizcaino, who had great faith in the punter-drawing power of the 3D process, established a very well worn plot for his cast to inhabit, or rather he borrowed it from other movies where the characters would visit some spooky old place to investigate it and subsequently be terrorised - The Haunting, The Blair Witch Project, you knew the drill. At least, you might have thought, this was not yet another found footage chiller, or you did until one of the blokes in the party of six, Toni (Óscar Sinela), whips out a video camera to record the excursion, though to be fair this turned out to be more of a product placement gamble which saw a load of fancy hardware prominently displayed over the course of the plot: check out those logos, if you were in any doubt. Nothing to take you out of a horror movie more than realising you were being advertised to.
Anyway, as Paranormal Xperience 3D (which was not a sequel like Friday the 13th Part 3D or Jaws 3D) unfolded it revealed itself to be a slasher movie, and we had to work out whether there really was a murderer stalking the abandoned mining town the cast wind up in, or whether it was all in the head of Angela's sister Diana (Alba Ribas), who is labouring under some childhood trauma or other which is beginning to surface. There was a serial killer figure wandering about, creepy mask present and correct, and he appeared to be wrapping people up in barbed wire and generally mutilating them to death in "pointing bits at the camera" fashion as befitted the technique, but then again we got a bunch of flashbacks to the girls' childhoods where their now-deceased father was behaving very strangely. Pausing briefly to note the overturning of the cliché where the girl cannot start the vehicle as the terror advances by making the girl in question (Úrsula Corberó) in possession of mechanic skills, the rest was pretty much as you'd expect, nothing shocking, just competent and uninspired. Music by Marc Vaíllo.
[Kaleidoscope released this in the UK on Blu-ray, with an option to watch it in either 2D or 3D versions.]
