Paranormal Prison starts out as your run of the mill faux-documentary movie including interviews and chats with the crew of online show The Skeptic. There’s the host, Matthew (Todd Haberkorn), Sara (Paris Warner) as the tech expert, Mannequin (Don Shanks) is the film guy, and Ashley (Corynn Treadwell) does the sound. They’re all ready to spend the night filming in one of the “most haunted prisons” in America…

Paranormal Prison is a very strange creature of a film. It has all the trappings of a haunted house/found footage movie, but the execution makes it something else. You see, Paranormal Prison doesn’t have the usual scares–in fact, it doesn’t have any. This movie just isn’t scary. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I can see people going into this expecting one type of movie and becoming disappointed. What you do get is a film that, if it weren’t for the swearing, would be a soft PG-13. Once again not necessarily a bad thing if you know what to expect.

One of the films strong suits is the acting. By no means perfect, it was good enough to keep me interested. Todd Haberkorn is mostly known for his voice acting so if you think you recognize his voice, chances are you do–especially if you watch English dubbed anime (Natsu from Fairy Tail) or play video games (Drifter from Destiny 2). He does well as the “skeptic” of the group and comes off as enough of a jerk without being downright hated. In fact, the whole core cast does well. But the real stand out is Paris Warner, she brings a believable sense of purpose. I wouldn’t mind seeing her as the lead in more films in the future.

I mentioned the core cast did well, that’s because the “interviews” that start the movie are downright bad. They could easily turn people off from watching the rest of the movie if they thought that was what they were getting into. It was low quality and poorly acted. If fact, that’s a running issue with Paranormal Prison. It seems so at odds with what it wants to be. While the core crew is good, the need to add “real interviews” was a misfire.

This goes to the “scares” as well. It wants to tell an interesting story but seems to feel the need to add poorly realized visual effects to remind us that it’s a haunted prison. The sound design also suffered. While mostly even, there were moments that noises were mentioned as loud or distracting but it was so low that you would find yourself confused at why someone was covering their ears.

Paranormal Prison isn’t a bad film, exactly, as I was oddly interested to see how it played out. The solid cast with a strong performance from Paris Warner helped keep me seated while the writing had some surprising funny parts and an overall good story to tell. The poor effects, odd editing, and confused identity keep it from being a good movie. It’s not scary enough to be considered a horror film and not tense enough to really be thought of as a thriller, regardless of what the movie posters try to tell you.

5 out of 10