We Bought a Zoo can F itself, because Mark and Jenna have bought a ghost town.* Their plans are to revitalize the remote, abandoned Old West town of Blackwood Falls into a family-friendly shopping destination and tourist attraction.

A recovering alcoholic turned workaholic, Mark (Andrew C. Fisher, 2010’s Night Music) is so sure it’ll work, he’s sunk their life savings into it. Jenna (Mandy Lee Rubio, Jurassic Tale) is … well, doing her damnedest to stay a supportive spouse.

The premise is not unlike this year’s millennial-driven Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, swapping one boogeyman for a boogeywoman. After digitally signing on the dotted line, of course, our couple learns Blackwood Falls’ true history: The Texas townspeople thought the brothel to be run by witches, not bitches, so they burned it to the ground and buried its prostitutes in a mass grave. Oops!

Minus a few flourishes impossible for Mark’s camera to catch, A Town Full of Ghosts plays as found footage intended for his YouTube channel. Even in his dead-of-night sojourns (Where’s that piano music coming from? Do you smell smoke?), he’s smashing that “REC” button almost as often as he pushes Jenna’s buttons of evaporating patience.

The found-footage subgenre has become so overused the last two decades, especially by indie filmmakers, because going that route maximizes what little resources are at their disposal. Therefore, it’s a bit of a wonder writer/director Isaac Rodriguez (Last Radio Call) is able to prove there’s life in it yet. He adds elements that work so well, they justify its use, from a wasp nest that grows exponentially overnight to, best of all, the ghost town’s wooden maze. The POV sequences of stumbling through it in darkness ring particularly effective; Rodriguez even tops it with an overhead drone shot that approximates the God-like view a classic video game, as we see Mark turning left and right, unable to see the horror ahead.

The movie’s not perfect, as Mark’s transformation seems rushed and some digital effects work diminish the scares. Still, amped by the built-in atmosphere, those frights are present and largely work, in part by the movie closing up shop at an economical 67 minutes. —Rod Lott

*In actuality, We Bought a Zoo can also F itself for being We Bought a Zoo.

Get it at Amazon.

I don’t like ghost movies in which someone says, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” The character may not be cognizant, but the movie sure as hell winks. Mid-Century is one of them.

Coinciding with a big eclipse, Alice (Chelsea Gilligan, Door to the Other Side) and Tom (Shane West, Escape the Field) rent a 1950s home for the weekend. She’s a surgeon interviewing for a hospital gig; he’s an architect who drops Andy Warhol quotes in his RFPs. And the house? It’s one of the first designed by architecture giant Frederick Banner (Stephen Lang, Don’t Breathe) — think, oh, Frank Lloyd Wright, but if Frank Lloyd Wright branched out from designing skyscrapers to also murder beautiful women.

Tom finds a book revealing Banner was a polygamist whose wife “disappeared” under mysterious circumstances. He was also deep into the occult via a secret society called The Brotherhood of the Orange King (you mean MAGA?), which sought to achieve immortality. Not long after, Tom starts receiving visits from a ghost of one’s Banner’s victims — lucky for him, a redheaded cutie-pie one (Sarah Hay, The Mortuary Collection).

And that’s merely the tip of the Eames chair. As a fan of mid-century modern architecture and its general aesthetic that seeped into the design of American culture at a time when “copasetic” lived free in our vernacular, I was primed for Mid-Century. Turns out, it’s a mess, but a fabulous-looking mess. The script by first-timer Mike Stern (who effectively plays Banner’s progeny) is overly complex, with too many characters straddling too many subplots amid too many time frames. It’s as if he gave his director (#1 Cheerleader Camp actress Sonja O’Hare) not merely a story, but a world-building bible.

It feels like three movies stuck together with tape — the kind people in movies tear with their teeth — and it would even if we discounted the hallucinatory cameo by the great Bruce Dern, who utters a few sentences without having to stand. While West is not likely destined for film history, he deserves credit for always showing up with a committed intensity. By contrast, a vacancy exists behind Gilligan’s lines, some of which are cribbed from millennial memes: “Real talk,” “This is a mood,” et al. In that spirit, I’ll borrow an oft-used slang word from my teenage son: This tale of the supernatural is indeed “mid.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.