PARANORMAL EXTREMES: TEXT MESSAGES FROM THE DEAD (2015) *

Writer/director Ted V. (The Corpse Grinders) Mikels made Paranormal Extremes:  Text Messages from the Dead when he was eighty-six years old.  I can’t imagine being alive and kicking at eighty-six, let alone making a movie at that age.  With that in mind, I tried to take it easy on the film.  However, this just might be Mikels’ worst.

Addison (Colie Knoke) is a ditzy blonde who meets an old man (Mikels) in the park.  He asks her to pass a message along to his wife.  When Addison does so, she’s befuddled to learn from the wife that the man has been dead for three years.  Later, her boyfriend goes on a business trip and keeps texting her about needing her help to “cross over”.  Since their last conversation revolved around a GPS, she thinks he needs help with directions.  Little does she know, he’s actually dead as a doornail and trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave.

Like most of Mikels’ latter-day shot-on-video affairs, Paranormal Extremes:  Text Messages from the Dead is a rather slipshod affair.  The dialogue and the acting are mostly terrible across the board (except for Mikels) and some of the extras and bit players are… shall we say… eclectic.  Knoke’s performance almost singlehandedly sinks it.  Her blank line readings and unresponsive reaction shots are often good for a laugh though.  There’s obviously SOMETHING supernatural going on around her, but she’s such a dim bulb that you have to wonder if she can even conceptualize what’s happening.  

If it was just a bimbo version of The Sixth Sense, I might’ve been okay.  However, once Knoke joins a Ghost Hunters-style reality show in the third act, I had to tap out.  It just tacks on another useless twenty minutes of unnecessary plot at the end and makes the one-hundred-and-two-minute running time feel a hell of a lot longer.