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The Invoking 3: Paranormal Dimensions
R0 - America - MVD Visual Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (25th September 2016). |
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The Film
 "Hundreds of disturbing paranormal events occur every year. Most of these terrifying encounters go unreported - until now. Enter the disturbing world of Invoking 3: Paranormal Dimensions where the undead come to wreak havoc upon the living. Grim Reapers, evil poltergeists, satanic forces and conjured spirits will feed off your fear and drag you into the abyss of waking nightmares." Marketed as the third installment in The Invoking series of diminishing returns, the film's onscreen title is actually Poltergeist Dimensions: The Invoking, and the compilation of underdeveloped punchline shorts seen elsewhere seems even more disparate than The Invoking 2 (and none of them have poltergeists). In The Dark Comes Quick, from director Chris Martens, adjunct professor Julian (Johnathan Brugal) is accompanied by joker Cooper (Garret Marchbank) and cameraman Eddie (John Kyle Sutton) when he breaks into the long abandoned Mictal Mines in Mexico in search of an ancient Aztec temple that serves as a gateway to the underworld. It goes without saying that they discover they are not alone in the mines (festooned with Aztec murals that look like finger painting), and there is little in the way of suspenseful buildup in the rush to get to the climax in under fifteen minutes. The most one can say about it is the acting is functional, the shakycam work relatively slick for what it is, and the few make-up effects and creature effects on display of a professional standard (if not particularly imaginative). In The Dweller, from directors David Weathers) and Calvin Main - previously seen on the web series Chapters of Horror, Collingswood, New Jersey gal Tessa Netting comes to realize that the rodent problem in her cabinets is something considerably bigger and more cunning. That's about it. Selfies from Pavel Soukup is even sparer, more of a setup and a punchline: a beaming New Yorker (They Look Like People's Margaret Ying Drake) discovers a sinister figure stalking her who show up in her selfies. Returning to the safety of her apartment, she makes the poor choice of deciding to test out her suspicions with a mirror selfie. Prisoner at Bannons, from Nailbiter's Patrick Rea and Shadow Falls Memorial's Kendall Sinn and possibly a follow-up of their joint 2006 short The Thing About Bannon's Lookout, finds an obnoxious reporter (Sally Spurgeon) and cameraman (Chris Durant) accompanying parents Elgin (Kurt Hanover) and Carol (Claudia Copping) to a rendezvous with something at midnight on Bannon's Road to get their abducted daughter back in return for one of its young. Unexpected twists barely make this one more watchable. La Dama de Blanco from Alfredo Hueck is a Venezuelan variation on the dead girl who haunts the highway where she died, but this one is known to jump in the car with motorists and cause major road accidents as a quartet of twenty-somethings discover on a drunken, sleep-deprived road trip. Predictable but well-made and interesting as a variation on the more benign American version of the urban legend. She is Not My Sister is a Czech-language and -set entry from Selfies' Soukup in which young step-siblings at odds with one another discover a portal to another dimension in their urban playground. Better than Selfies but that's not saying much. Heartbreak and the Dead from Ruben Rodriguez parallels the emotional plight of a young woman (Jenna Kildosher) whose has lost her boyfriend with a worldwide cataclysm outside as relayed through Emergency Broadcast System announcements on the television. Underdeveloped but moody and slickly-made. Bedroom Window – also from director Calvin Main and previously featured on the web series Chapters of Horror – is the story of fearful parents Amanda (Spare Change's Alison Becker) and Steve (Broadway Lofts' Chris Alvarado) discovering their young son Tyler (Samuel Alamazon) missing from his bedroom and a video he shot to discover who or what opened his window every night. Perhaps the most frustrating of the shorts in that the idea is rife with possibility and the adult performances are quite good, but the child actor's performance is just distractingly bad (his screen time is short enough, however, that one does not actually wish for something bad to happen to him). The concluding segment titled 3 A.M. from Lee Matthews will be familiar to fans of bottom-of-the-barrel DTV cinema as being directly lifted from the equally uneven DTV horror anthology The Horror Network in which a young woman (Charlotte Armstrong) living alone on an isolated Welsh farm is terrorized by strange calls every night at three. Underdeveloped and derivative, the seemingly superior video transfer here over its previous presentation does reveal what seemed to me back then to be an unmotivated music sting jump scare to have been caused cued by a branch suddenly whipping at a window. Impossible to judge as a whole because the entries are so disparate, the misleadingly-titled The Invoking 3: Poltergeist Dimensions could best be described as "watchable" (and would have been more so had it just been promoted as a survey of recent horror shorts rather than a self-contained anthology. 
Video
Shot in a variety of HD video formats in different aspect ratios, MVD's single-layer presentation is serviceable: nothing more, nothing less. 
Audio
Audio is Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo only, and stereo is likely the final mixing format of these shorts. The mixes are of varying quality in terms of sound design and mixing levels. The Spanish-language segment features easy-to-read yellow English subtitles while the Czech segment has tiny English subtitles that may be hard to read because of their size and the speed of the dialogue. 
Extras
There are no extras. 
Overall
Impossible to judge as a whole because the entries are so disparate, the misleadingly-titled The Invoking 3: Poltergeist Dimensions could best be described as "watchable" (and would have been more so had it just been promoted as a survey of recent horror shorts rather than a self-contained anthology. 
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