"Jessabelle" The Girl Who Never Was

The Trailer:

Director: Kevin Greuttert
Cast: Sarah Snook, Joelle Carter, Mark Webber, & David Andrews

Synopsis: After a tragic car accident, Jessabelle (Sarah Snook), returns to her childhood home to recuperate. While staying there with her estranged father, Leon (David Andrews), a ghostly entity begins to wreak havoc on her life.

I wish horror movie makers would stop making movies about a person returning to their childhood home where they uncover some dark secret about his/her parents, which they now feel they must fix. It is an old and tired trope that, of late, is so predictable that it rarely conjures any fear in most viewers. Case in point: Jessabelle. There are so many horror clichés and tropes in this movie that it almost seems like a mockery of modern horror films, except that it is dead serious in its clichéd mediocrity. From fairly early on, I knew that the movie was going into evil twin territory, I just didn't know how it was going to proceed and be explained. Still, both procession and explanation the movie provides are nothing of originality or intelligence and didn't intrigue me not one bit. I mean, the most important detail that explains how these series of events came to be doesn't make sense, which basically makes the movie moot. !!!Spoiler Alert!!! I wasn't gonna give away the ending, but it is so ludicrous, that I just have to get it off my chest for anyone who dared to read beyond the spoiler alert. Okay, so the ghost that is haunting Jessabelle (who I will now from this point forward be referring to as Jessie) is the real Jessabelle. You see, Jessabelle's mom, Kate (Joelle Carter) had an affair with a black, voodoo practitioner ("ahh lets add voodoo to the story to give it some edge", the writer thought) and was impregnated by him. And so, when Kate gave birth to a black baby, Leon knew the baby wasn't his and so decided to murder it! Then Leon decides to adopt Jessie as a cover up to the murder. The big freaking problem with this is that we are shown a flashback of Jessabelle's birth, and it's in a hospital with nurses and a doctor, all who saw that Jessabelle was black. So how did no one say anything when Leon shows up one day with a white baby??? Up to this point, the movie was already disappointing in its lack of creativity, but then with this stupid backstory, it just fell to a lower level of lameness.  !!!Spoiler Alert Over!!! Also, there is a random romance angle with an old high school boyfriend, Preston (Mark Webber), but this really serves no purpose to the story other than being the romance angle. SNORE. And then there's the accents. This movie is set in Louisiana, so of course they had to have actors fake a southern drawl, except it sounds too forced coming from Sarah Snook and Mark Webber. Why not just find southern actors with a real southern accent? *Sigh*

There are certain aspects I liked in this film, though, like the setting. I love a movie set in the south, because it adds a layer of mysticism and a touch of whimsy that usually works well with ghost stories; so the fact that this movie was set in Louisiana was good for me. And there were some jump scares that rattled me a bit, so that's a plus. And the acting was okay, nothing stellar. Overall this movie is nothing new. I was never roped into the movie, I simply finished it because I hate leaving a movie in the middle, because sometimes movies really pick up in the second half. Now for the true test of whether I thought it was bad or good: Would I watch it again? No.