Rarely indeed does a movie come along that is so incompetently made, so poorly shot, so ill-thought-out, so ineptly acted, so amateurishly edited and so embarrassingly awful on all levels that you know, in the midst of the awful suffering of actually watching it, that you're seeing something most people will never experience in their entire lives. Paranormal Retreat is one such movie. I have to believe that there must have been some kind of inhumanly dark and brilliant mind that created this because no film could actually be this bad accidentally.

You know how they say that a monkey with a typewriter might theoretically pound out the works of Shakespeare at some point over the course of infinity? Well, there's even less of a chance that a movie this bad could just blossom into being randomly.

The setup for the film is more well-known than a $1 hooker at a Shriner's convention: a paranormal research team investigates a haunted location. It's supposed to be some old farmhouse, but the place looks pretty modern to me -- I know the barn is certainly made of metal. Anyway, lots of goofy, inane banter ensues as the team eventually finds the actual location. It's never clear to me whether they are believers or debunkers, but that really doesn't matter. Weird things start happening almost immediately -- in particular involving contact with locals (especially a grumpy farmer) who weren't supposed to be there.

Then the ghosts begin to make their presence known. It's a funny thing about these ghosts -- although the characters apparently can't see them, the viewer can plainly see people walking and crawling around doing things. Maybe I was supposed to pretend that I couldn't see them? The filmmakers apparently thought that shooting these "ghosts" with low-quality cameras in poorly lit conditions made them seem invisible or something. Who knows what these folks were thinking? You literally can't see what is going on for at least half of the movie -- no one could hold a camera steady.

I could go on and on bashing this film, but I think I've made my point. These guys didn't even edit out the parts where actors could be heard laughing off-camera at the end of a couple of scenes. Let's be clear about one thing, though -- this is not one of those "so bad they're good" bad movies. Paranormal Retreat is a "so bad you can't believe how incredibly bad it is" bad movie that is haunted by its complete and utter incompetence.