Review: Paranormal Apparition, Aka Cold Blood Canyon

Review: Paranormal Appartition
By William Pattison, aka Eric Morse
For Horror Bob's Blog

Last night I watched the newly released film Paranormal Apparition. To my shock I realized I was watching a film I saw a screener of nearly ten years ago. Amusingly enough Paranormal Apparition is in fact the film Cold Blood Canyon, which was shelved all those years ago. I know this because Elissa Dowling who plays the ghost in the film sent me a screener. This was before she turned into a total bitch and started bad mouthing me and Cory Steven’s film Friday the 13^th: Mother’s Day to make points with Bloody-Disgusting. Even back then some people were mercenary douche bags that would sell out friends for cheap promotion. Anyway, back to the film. The distributor, World Wide Distribution had the filmmaker update the film a bit. They reshot a few scenes to add CGI FX . It was amusing because the lead actress and cast look ten years older, and she had a boob job since, so there are continuity issues. One nice thing that royally helps the film, besides the CGI, is the fact the filmmaker cut out all of Elissa scenes as the ghost and had another actress with what looks like oatmeal smeared over her face re-due the scenes with CGI enhancements. The thing is in the original cut of the film Elissa tried to be like the ghost girl from The Grudge and was gyrating around like a palsy girl on meth. If you found her annoying as the screaming girl in the documentary His Name Was Jason, you would find her royally annoying spasming through her ghost scenes in the original cut of the film. Unfortunately, the filmmaker did keep Elissa in the film via flashbacks, though you can really see that this is old footage because she look nothing like she does today. Thankfully she has very few speaking lines. So all in all I found the new cut of the film watchable. It might become one of those films you watch with friends drunk and try to count all the continuity mistakes and laugh at the Quaker Oats ghost scenes. But for me it is one film I will avoid like the plague, because of some nasty past associations. I give this film one generous howl on the new Wolf Pack Howl Scale. Atleast it is a vast improvement over the total stinker that was shelved all those years ago….

(Oh, and an amusing note, along with the screen I got of the new cut of this film I also got promotional material for the film along with a copy of the trailer. Nowhere in the promotional material is Elissa Dowling mentioned. She actually doesn’t even appear in the trailer I saw…So me finding out the truth about this film makes the fact that Elissa is being ignored that much more amusing….)