MY CALL: This was… not good. Lame, boring, bad death scenes… I have nothing good to say about this.
Perhaps because of the director’s (Gus Trikonis; Baywatch, Beauty and the Beast) general inexperience in the genre, the opening sequence feels unlike classic horror even though we viewers know better based, if nothing else, on the movie title alone. The property caretaker wanders through a huge house following the sounds of perhaps kids or women talking and giggling. It leads him to his fiery death at the basement furnace. So now, just in case the audience wasn’t sure, haunted!
Dr. Caroline Arnold (Joanna Pettet; Casino Royale) is a psychologist hoping to start a drug rehab center. She buys a grand Civil War-era mansion and hires a few friends and grad school interns to fix it up. But just as soon as she was deciding to buy the place, Caroline started having persistent visions of a ghostly form that only she can see, and it seems to be guiding her to something. Eventually it leads her to a dust-covered diary… and then other stuff.
Other than the ghostly sounds and form (seen by Caroline), we begin with the typical early-stage haunting antics. A dog freaks out, stumbling across a dead body in the dumbwaiter (the burned to death caretaker), the discovery of an archaically locked cellar door (that someone naturally unlocks), ghostly psychokinetic force throwing someone across a room and later rather aggressively undressing a women, doors are opening and slamming shut on their own, oh… and the house has locked and trapped everyone inside and rendered the glass windows unbreakable (apparently).
The death scenes… they’re not good. The burning death (caretaker) is just okay even if perhaps more shocking in the 70s. The electrical wire death is super lame as the victim is holding and shaking the wire which eventually is strangling him. Some dude just catches fire while climbing a rope. You know what… I’m done reviewing lame death scenes in this lame movie. Although, there is a pretty gnarly scene when a guy nearly buzzsaws off his own hand. But that’s about it. One scene that was meant to be intense felt nothing of the sort—again, I wonder if it would have been more intense by 70s standards. The theme here is that all the horror elements are falling short.
This was pretty much boring for its entire running time. So, here’s to another “classic” that would best be left forgotten. Lame. Not recommended.