Hackneyed storytelling and insipid performances are the hallmarks of "Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour," an amateur-hour supernatural thriller that has all the professionalism and polish of an F-earning junior high school film project.
Sarah (Rissa Walters) is a 17-year-old girl who goes to stay with her recently deceased best friend's grandmother in a small mountain town in California. The minute she arrives at the place, she's plunged into a mind-numbing mystery story involving curses, avenging spirits, and a whole raft of poorly staged flashback sequences.
The actors read their lines as if they'd never performed for an audience before, either on stage or in front of a camera – which may indeed be the case with some of them – and Lisa Comrie demonstrates no more confidence as a director than the performers do as actors.
"Paranormal Hour" was the first in what was intended to be a series of mystery films with the Nancy Drew-like Sarah Landon character as the protagonist. Fortunately, given everything that it's had to put up with lately, the world was at least spared that fate.
