Season 5 is not your older brother’s A Haunting. After a surprisingly subpar premiere, I examined the “cast and crew” of BLOOD VISIONS with that of a smoldering and delightfully nuanced Season 1 favorite, THE HAUNTING OF SUMMERWIND. The reason for the dropoff in quality quickly became apparent: a near total turnover in production staff. Season 5 is also operating with a skeleton crew compared to Season 1, with far less differentiated job functions in the areas of sound and visual effects. But before I get into the details, let me first regale you with my scathing indictment of BLOOD VISIONS.

I waited 4 years for new episodes, but last night’s Season 5 premiere offended more of my sensibilities (i.e., artistic, intellectual) and left me with an aftertaste so foul, I needed the 1979 Salem’s Lot to cleanse my palette. I would have thrown in an old episode of A Haunting, but it would have saddened me since I rewatched them all as a build up to the Sreason 5 premiere. I put a great deal of pressure on myself to like the premiere as did many of you — I can tell. But unlike some of you who will not be honest with yourself or others — I am not going to continue to wave my pom poms in some denial or inability to tolerate cognitive dissonance. I can celebrate the first 3 seasons (by the fourth season, the program was beginning to lose some of its luster), and yet cry in my cereal over this latest abomination. I would be embarrassed now to call myself a fan of this program. Judging from the tepid response on FACEBOOK/DESTINATION AMERICA, which features less than a handful of positive comments — all of the 6-words-or-less variety — despite a groundswell of anticipation and a countdown atmosphere, others feel the same. (This review you are reading was removed, so DESINATION AMERICA is not allowing any reviews that are not positive).

Where do I begin? What went wrong? The episode begins amusingly enough, with a shot of the soon-to-be-possessed Detroit pot-bellied teen in a motley wife-beater. I always did enjoy the quirkiness of this program and the way it captured the eccentrities of the haunting victims through character acting and interviews (see SUMMERWIND and FLORIDA). But THIS was just bad. Acting that doesn’t belong on any size screen and excerpts from interviews that fell flat.

I’m still trying to determine which was more obvious and obnoxiously gratuitous — the dialogue or the special effects. First, the dialogue. Now I understand why this program was moved to DESTINATION AMERICA. The characters all talked like tour guides, explaining to each other everything that was going on right in front of their eyes (and that we can plainly see at home). No one talks like this in real life. You get that, Michael Ray Brown? The script even managed to make the once smoldering Anthony Call sound like a high school drama student. And yet this lack of subtlety was somehow topped by the plainly visible hand of the computer in the CGI effects. Ghost stories is the one place where less is more in the CGI department. And yet from all appearances, BLOOD VISIONS was vying to overtake Star Wars. The black smoky ectoplasmic like substance on the ceiling — rendered capably in the 2005 episode CURSED — looks entirely digitized in BLOOD VISIONS. It’s the CGI equivalent of seeing the strings holding up the planets in 1950s Flash Gordon films. I was embarrassed for everyone watching this thing try to pass for something real and substantive. Nothing — I repeat — NOTHING — throws a wet towel over a creepy atmospheric vibe better than overly-wrought and exposed computer graphics. I didn’t know whether to blame less skilled staff, less psychologically sophisticated minds, or the technology itself — but last night’s episode was less Industrial Light and Magic and more Atari. The reality of ghostly phenomenon is subtle and mysterious, and this should play into the hands of good film-making, which stirs our soul by leaving a little to the imagination. Not BLOOD VISIONS, where the demon actually enters the room of the girl “investigator,” and then runs from her as she chases it through her home hollering “We are going to help that family!” Pathetic.

And the cinematography and editing was nothing short of dizzying and had me wondering whether the entire crew needs to be treated for ADHD. All this — the shortfalls in writing, editing, cinematography, and special effects — amounts to poor storytelling. Seasons 1-4 met their burden — the challenge of selling us on some rather unbelievable events. Season 5 might as well classify itself as fiction. When you can’t tell a story well, the lack of wit and believability is all the more exposed. I did not question the credibility of Season 2 WHERE DEMONS DWELL in which Satan Himself crawls out in the flesh from a well behind a rental property in rural Connecticut, and yet I doubted everything depicted in BLOOD VISIONS right down to the 16-year-old Buffy who chased away the demon like one would take a broom to a raccoon in one’s garage. If I learned nothing from seasons 1-4, smudging does not work and 16-year-old valley girls with no background in science or connection to the Church can chase demons away. Unless of course the prayer read off that single sheet of paper was actually the script for last night’s episode, which could probably chase anything on Heaven and Earth.

This brings us to another problem. Season 5 is less disciplined than Season 1 and plays too loose with the facts. Perhaps the absence of an active research manager (i.e., Carol Bornman)is responsible. There were some rather fascinating aspects to the Summerwind Haunting that did not make its way into the episode. Rooms changing dimensions on contractors, Possessions of former residents appearing as double exposures in Hinshaw photographs. That corpse in the crawl space that Arnie sent April in to investigate. Then it occurred to me that perhaps to play it conservatively and let the implied aspects of the mystery do the talking, the SUMMERWIND crew decided only to include what those aspects of the haunting that seemed relatively more reliable (e.g., multiple eye witnesses, consistent accounts). But a number of things occur in BLOOD VISIONS for which the crew accepted on faith the account of a single person — namely the little girl investigator who witnessed the demon appear in her own home.

A HAUNTING, the series, was beginning to unravel in Season 4, but I hoped the producers mailed it in because they knew the show wouldn’t be renewed. Now I can see they just lost the recipe.

COMPARING THE CREW

SUMMERWINDs capable writing was a collaboration between Fred Mills and series producer Larry Silverman, who limited himself to an executive producer role for BLOOD VISIONS. I guess we have only Michael Ray Brown to blame for the writing of BLOOD VISIONS.

BLOOD VISIONS lists no cinematographers among its cast and crew whereas SUMMERWIND carries both Ray Brown and Michael Bratkowski.

Katherine Pritchard remains the only holdover from the SUMMERWIND Art Department, but BLOOD VISIONS employs no construction coordinator (Ryan Brinkley), set dressing leadman (Kate Forry), property master (Kathleen Martin), production graphics (Chuck Newsome), art direction (Jack Ryan), set decoration (Angela Castillo), or painter (Jackie Smith). Now perhaps some of these positions were consolidated in BLOOD VISIONS, but therein could lie a problem as well.

The SUMMERWIND sound department is also more complex. While both employ sound recordists (BLOOD VISIONS actually employs one more than SUMMERWIND), BLOOD VISIONS does not employ sound editors (Larry Goeb & James Cret Wilson), sound supervisor (Mike Puckett), or a production sound mixer (Kenneth Altman). This may explain why we love the original sound in the early episodes. There is a great deal of attention paid to the sound and the music, and each early episode has its own score that sets it apart. BLOOD VISIONS did not appear to have an original score.

SUMMERWIND employ costume designers (Rebecca Kurtz and Lance Culpepper) while BLOOD VISIONS scales this back to Rebecca Kurtz. BLOOD VISIONS lacks a makeup department (Terea Gorsick).

SUMMERWIND also has an elaborate production staff that appears to be missing entirely from BLOOD VISIONS. Executive in charge of production Nicolas Valcour I suspect was key in the program’s early success. He did not return for Season 5. Neither did production VP Michelle LeDoux. SUMMERWIND also carries an array of directors, including Vernon Guinn (first assistant director), Roz Victa (second assistant director), and Joe Wiecha (field director). SUMMERWIND also credits 3 production coordinators, a production assistant, and a location manager, none of which are listed for BLOOD VISIONS. Other than that the 4 episode producers are the same.

SUMMERWIND differentiates between “special effects” (Anthony Torres) and “visual effects” (Meliza Fermin, visual effects artist and Joe Pitts, visual effects coordinator). No one is credited for BLOOD VISIONS.

SUMMERWIND retains an editoral department of 5, including a post-production coordinator, two online editors, and a supervising and assistant editor, whereas BLOOD VISIONS makes due with Alex J. Spence.

SUMMERWIND retains a camera and electrical department of 10, compared to the 2 employed by BLOOD VISIONS.

And then of course, there’s the acting. Kera O’Bryon (also in GATEWAY TO HELL), Scott Rollins (also in DEMON CHILD and HUNGRY GHOSTS), Justin Dray, and Marcello Rollando perform capably in SUMMERWIND to deliver that very amusing Hinshaw family quirkiness that comes across in clips from the interviews. We feel for this family, yes, but we also laugh a little at how they cope with the haunting and the aggregate effect of all this is we harbor a mild affection for them. The same could not be said of the family from BLOOD VISIONS. None of the actors in BLOOD VISIONS is listed in the IMDB full cast and crew, so I cannot put any names to the horrible acting.

After a brutally bad premiere episode BLOOD VISIONS, ANGELS & DEMONS restores a measure of hope for the rescuscitation of A HAUNTING from its five year coma. While still plagued by bad writing and hyperactive CGI that undercuts atmosphere, the problems were not severe enough to obscure an interesting story. More substantive and animated, the interview clips meshed well among the narration and character re-enactment as compared to BLOOD VISIONS, where it felt more perfunctory — more forced into a template.

The use of special effects, while obnoxious in transitioning between scenes (and during the climactic exorcism), were executed effectively in portraying the movement of the back-pack and the sleeptalking of the acutely possessed son, whose verbal regurgitation of an argument he was not present to hear had struck that first vital stranger-than-fiction note of the season. (The strength of the series has always been the depiction of events that parodoxically strain and support credibility in that they seem unlikely inventions of the imagination).

The program however continues to suffer from writing problems, particularly in the area of dialog. I’m inclined to say the episode was written for ABC Daytime but some of those daytime dramas are actually superior on this score. Written for daytime soaps, acted for the theater. It’s as if the actors were instructed by the director: “the audience is hard of hearing, blind in one eye, and one standard deviation short of the median IQ. This was evidenced in Karen Carbone, whose acting skills I would have deemed gag-worthy if she had not come off so well as Jan Foster in the Season 2 episode DEMON CHILD.

Narrator Tony Call is another casualty of a poor script. What a waste of a master craftsman. His lines are dreadfully on-the-nose. While words like “the shocking answer would come all too soon” fit seamlessly and added to the suspense of season 1 episode ECHOES FROM THE GRAVE, the line “little did she know it would become her worst nightmare” struck me as juvenile and like the interview from BLOOD VISIONS, formulaic. As in BLOOD VISIONS, the narration contributed little of value, telling us either what we already knew, what was unfolding before our eyes, or did not need to know. In BLOOD VISIONS, when the possessed teen hears the disembodied voice of the demon — “Die Now” — the voice of Tony Call reminding us that it was “the same phrase written on the bathroom mirror” only blunted its impact and prompted my wife to ask, “how stupid does this program think we are?” At the end of ANGELS & DEMONS, a new individual is introduced in an interview clip that had my wife and I simultaneously asking one another: “Who is this woman?” We were able to determine it was the friend and Tarot card reader, but the lack of set-up made for an odd moment that disrupted the flow. Building a quality program begins from the ground up or the inside out, to borrow some clichéd metaphors and that means greater emphasis on writing. Writing. Writing. Writing.

Until the writing and some other problems are corrected, the program will at best imitate some of the best aspects of original series but fail to re-capture its soul. That’s how Angels & Demons plays out … as a soul-less imitation

I’m so glad they brought A Haunting back, as it is my absolute most favorite show on television. That said, season 5 has been terrible thus far. I do have hope that it might get better? I will watch the bad episodes to support the show and maybe give it more time to improve. Bad episodes of A Haunting are better then no episodes at all, right?

how many episodes are there going to be for season 5 ? does anyone know yet ?