Review of Fangoria’s The Occupants

Gradually. Lucy and Wade start to notice strange little disturbances. This eventually turns into them seeing full-blown apparitions walking their house, chopping vegetables and watching t.v. They seem to be the ghosts of an extremely dysfunctional family that previously owned the house. Things get worse and Lucy seeks help and guidance from various people, including their religious (and possibly abused) babysitter, a medium and her incredibly weird and smarmy ex-boyfriend/ex-therapist/colleague. Their “friendship” is so off and strange that I have literally no idea why she would seek his help or continue to eat lunch with him everyday even after he bashes her beliefs and Wade, who is a good husband and father. It really makes no sense in real-life terms. Also the medium is no help whatsoever and the babysitter becomes to disturbed to be of any real help either.

So Lucy and Wade are basically on their own for the entire film trying to decide how to handle the ghosts. After that there’s talk of ghosts, demons, a father/husband murdering his family, Lucy becoming afraid of Wade and not letting him touch the baby for absolutely no reason other than she’s afraid that he could be possessed by the evil dead dad; even though there is no evidence of this. We are then bombarded with about four insane plot twists as the movie progresses; each more implausible than the last. With each twist and progressively bad acting I was begging for the movie to end. And at barely 80 minutes, that’s really saying something.

I could take the low-budget production, the mediocre-too-poor acting for a while, but eventually with how awful the plot became (basically borrowing from every ghost movie ever) I actually started to get angry at the movie. I was going to rate this higher, but the pile of plot twists that had no basis and were basically cheats to make you question everything you’d seen I can’t give this movie higher than one star. My intelligence actually feels insulted by the way twists were just thrown in, holes and all. I’ll file this under avoid. I was really looking forward to The Occupants solely based on the fact that it’s a Fangoria produced horror film. Being “The First in Fright” it should have been at least decent, but I’m sad to say that I am severely disappointed with the final product.

The Occupants stars Cristin Milioti (How I Met Your Mother) and Michael Rady (The Mentalist) and if you’re still interested, it is available to rent on various VOD services and will be released on bluray and dvd March 4, 2014.