Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour: Critic Reviews

The film is sunk by a pervasive stasis, the byproduct not of mood but of the filmmakers' amateurish abilities. If there's one thing Nick and Disney know, it's that youthful entertainment needs to keep moving.

The ear-numbing dialogue explains (and explains) rather than dramatizes, though, and the performances are earnest and flat

Beset by bad lighting, limited visual imagination and acting so wooden it might have termites.

Landon won't be a household name any time soon...

Someone must have greenlit this one without realizing it doesn't have a ghost of a chance.

...awkward in a high-school-drama-club way...

Clumsy, tween-focused thriller wastes potential.

Do-nothing Sarah may be the dullest, most featureless and inactive protagonist in recent movies -- great news for those Scooby-Doo die-hards who never got enough Freddy.

The filmmaking is borderline incompetent -- the acting varies from okay to awful, the cinematography is unpleasantly soft and the tone is badly misjudged.

Either flush with cash or in possession of incriminating photographs of a Freestyle Releasing executive, somehow this family pushed their tween mystery into a theatrical release this weekend, despite making a picture almost completely devoid of polish.