“Your house killed my dog.” – Best worst line from movie 

I wanted to walk out after 60 seconds from this “Paranormal” knock-off. The Apparition begins with a prologue that extends back 40 years with anachronistic found footage. An entity, that’s a boogeyman from behind the attic walls, has been on the border between here and the other side. Only in present time has it now decided to torment Kelly (Ashley Greene) and Ben (Sebastian Stan). One of them was meant to be haunted for life’s eternity, so, Guess Who? This is a nasty picture of the wrong kind. It shrieks your ears then torments your higher senses.

How do you slog through horrible schlock like this and end up awake on the other side? When you’re a guy like me, you study the natural comely beauty of actress Greene for 80 minutes (she is Alice Cullen in the “Twilight” movies). Even while in peril by ghosts in consecutive days, she manages to have consecutive perfect hair days. Fabulous blow-dried hair with a few accent curls. Also, crimped eyelashes, doe eyes, glossy lips. No wonder the ghosts want to attack her face through an up-close camera while she is asleep in a tent. I want to curl up next to her and stare into her face, too.

Anyway, when a girl is that pretty you wonder why she just doesn’t dump disaster-prone Ben and call on another boyfriend candidate who is stable and heroic, a loyal best friend, or a concerned parent. She has retreat options, but this being a dim-witted horror movie she is of course denied by shopworn screenplay restrictions.

I absolutely have no sympathy for this movie’s writer-director Todd Lincoln. If there is a single ghastly thing about this production it is his choice of shot composition. And the final freak-out of the movie is nothing more than a cynical genre cliché cave in.

82 Minutes. Rated PG-13.

HORROR / CHEESY CONCEPTS / FRIDAY NIGHT SUCKFEST

Film Cousins: “The Amityville Horror” (1979); “Poltergeist” (1982); “The Blair Witch Project” (1999); “Paranormal Entity” (2009).