Joining Stewart are a husband and wife team of paranormal investigators, as well as a priest. The group sets up inside the mansion and conducts a seance where viewers can call in and ask questions. As expected, they get a number of prank calls. My favorite was the one where someone screams, "Iron Maiden rules! White Lion sucks!" where I misheard the first part as, "I'm eating rolls!"
Things go wrong during the seance and there seems to be a malevolent presence in the house. The whole thing seems to be spiraling out of control when Frank and the priest get locked in the basement by someone or something unknown. I don't want to give too any details about what happens after this in case you plan on watching it.
The faux local commercials are spot on and so are the cringeworthy jokes and banter between the anchors. I absolutely loved the commercial for an 80s hair metal compilation. They've done a fantastic job of making it look like it was actually a tape of an 80s broadcast. In fact, if I had found a VHS of this at a flea market and it had a hand written label, I would have thought it was authentic until I saw how the movie ended.
The film was actually copied multiple times from VHS to VHS to give it the authentic feel of a generated bootleg tape. As a former tape trader, the fuzzy video brought me back to the time where I obsessively traded tapes and would have traded for something like this.
What I didn't like was that the first half hour is the local news. Sure it's spot on, but it wasn't that interesting and we almost bailed on watching the rest since nothing was really happening. And while I liked the commercials, there were too many of them and sometimes it was frustrating. It seemed like some of them repeated also.
Overall an effective and fun throwback, but unfortunately they will probably lose a lot of viewers during the opening half hour newscast since they've done such a good job that it's actually like watching some random towns local news.
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