This piece of celluloid feculence is also known as Frightmare, and we really have to say that is truly frightening, truly scary, truly scream-inducing what some "directors" seem to think is a passable excuse for a slasher film. Ash Smith, who both wrote and directed Paranoid, must have either had big balls or been totally delusional to have had the gumption to make this miserable excuse for a film (much less a slasher film). It really isn't surprising that his name hasn't graced anything since 2003, when he supplied the script for an Ace Cruz film entitled Fate (trailer) – starring Michael Paré, Lee Majors and Philip Michael Thomas, a list of "stars" that already gives a clear indication of the quality of that film – but what is surprising is that Paranoid was ever deemed worth releasing, even if only direct-to-video.
The plot of Paranoid loosely involves the appearance of travelling serial killer known as the Conscience Killer, who wears a ratty wig and stupid mask, in a small town around Halloween just as a group of college-age-looking teenagers are putting on a haunted house so as to raise money for a trip to the Curacaos where they hope to meet friendly Dutch men. Of course, the body count begins...
Although it is nice when it happens, nobody really expects slashers to have new or intelligent plot lines, but it is beneficial when, no matter how generic the plot, the story makes sense, the actions of the characters is minutely realistic, the direction shows at least some visual creativity, a certain intensity of tension is raised and (hopefully) maintained, the acting achieves a tiny level of professionalism and the dialogue offers a smidgeon of verisimilitude – or, if all that is lacking, that the film at least fully embraces its thorough ineptitude and strives for total, unadulterated crappy fun. Paranoid, however, strives for nothing and offers nothing and, as a result, is nothing but a displeasurable waste of time.
Not that Paranoid initially reveals itself as the bomb – the total piece of donkey regurgitation – that it is. The opening credit sequence is rather promising, despite it being (but for the cockroaches) an ever so obvious low budget take off of that from Seven (1995 / trailer). With the opening scene, the laziness of the scriptwriter announces itself glaringly: the unnamed First Girl (Tyler Thebaut), a trainer at a fitness center, doesn't bother locking up the front door after the last client leaves despite being alone at night in a Nautilus gym in a deserted street mall. Smith milks the set-up for all he can, failing to realize that the he made the set-up so cheap that the viewer doesn't give a flying fuck anymore, anyways. The babe, however, actually makes it home – only to find that the C.K. was already there and has not only massacred her parents, but decorated the walls with scribbles and doodles. She finally dies soon thereafter, but the film doesn't get any better.
The convoluted and decidedly not very exciting nor in any way suspenseful tale that follows has the typical group of over-aged teenagers talking total shit and doing totally stupid things in a world in which logical behavior has no place. In a town where a murder takes place, the cop dad of one of the kids locks his son up in jail and tells the other kids to forget it when they tell him of a run-in with a weapon-wielding maniac in a deserted house – and the kids actually shut up and forget it (but for one, the Final Girl). When a 9 pm curfew is announced, they throw a late-night rave at which the killer of course shows up and actually kills one dickhead, a scene that enables the dude(s)* later revealed to be the killer to be at two places at the same time. 
(As for the other deaths, for a slasher they are few and far between until the last ten minutes, and even then one death is done totally off-screen and the blood and guts trickle like water in a drought.) Another one of those wonderful lapses in logic this film is full of occurs when the Final Girl (Shanda Lee Munson – much too busty to play a babe that doesn't get naked) is chased by the killer through her house the first time and survives; no one believes her 'cause the closet door that the killer broke in his attempts to get her is gone ("There is no closet door," says the cop and that's that), but no mention is made of the fact that the killer broke down her bedroom door first.
Whatever. This film sucks so badly that it really isn't worth bitching about its failings, because it is only a sum of failings. Paranoid is shit shit shit – so shitty, that if it were fertilizer, it could fertilize the world. It stinks worse than the unwashed ass of a skanky transvestite hooker bottom after ten weeks work without rubbers or a single shower. Paranoid pissed us off so much we hope that everyone involved dies a painful death… Well, okay, the babes are allowed to live, because even if they couldn't act they did truly have the babe factor and one – blonde Summer Sloan LaPann in her only film credit ever as Courtney Turner (she dies off screen) – did sorta have a sweet Southern accent good for sweet nothings. But sweet nothings can't help a film that offers absolutely nothing, and that is all Paranoid offers.
*So now you know that the killer ain't a gal... but is it just one or is it two or maybe more killers? Do you even care? You shouldn't...
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