First of all, don't be fooled by the scary poster (the best thing bout this "project", and must have been the biggest expenditure out of a $4,000 (!) budget) there is No Horror! Only the tedious tease of a seemingly threatening presence, who turns out to be a friendly ghost, like Casper, who drones on and on and on in that annoying phony threatening evil spirit voice (unlike Casper), taking almost a full second's pause between Every-Single-Syllable spoken, to string you along with the hope that something Bad might actually happen, but also to even barely stretch out the run time to a full hour + feature film length. More padding is provided by the lovely, lengthy drive from Baltimore to the deepest of the deep backwoods of Virginia, which seems like it slows to real time, as in any normal picture, they would have driven coast to coast by then. Then there's the most egregious padding of all, a 10 minute segment of stock footage of a civil war reenactment, overlain with that obnoxious spirit droning on and on about every military maneuver in tedious detail, so that at this point I had to fast forward to the end, where the all the restless spirits are finally, uneventfully, without any hocus pocus or mumbo jumbo, properly put to rest, and they all rested in peace happily ever after.
The actors are better than most cheapies, in that they can at least get their lines out of this plodding script, which even starts out seemingly more intelligent than most until it devolves into repetitious recounting of the pop psychology of our hero's sister's spiritualism in the face of the foreboding. Sister actually does a competent reading of a decent (if long, of course), eerie poem, so, though another long delay in whatever little action there is, I'm gonna throw out a compliment to her, which is the Only good thing I'll say about this, and a left-handed one at that, as ultimately it's just more padding. Our story begins with yet another long tedious scene of two guys at a bar, backs to the camera, arguing about "getting the band back together". As long as our hero resists, if I was the other guy I would've said a lot sooner "aright aready, we'll just get someone else!", but no, we have to hear out our hero's long-winded account of how his life's been paralyzed by this sense of foreboding that he just can't seem to shake. Besides being padding, my point here is that the entire interaction is shot at our hero's back, so that you barely see even the most fleeting split-second glimpse of half his profile thru his rock star hair the whole time he's speaking. Is he a Man of Mystery? Well, that's blown the next shot where he's shot face full on. Cheap, bad camera work? absolutely.
There's a consummately boring score of a solo piano repeating the Very Same Few Notes over and over, nothing else, ad nauseum. That, paired with that insufferable droning, is, of itself, enough to drive you mad (irritated, angry)
To top it off, the final shot is of our hero staring contemplatively into an ersatz zen meditation pool, at the overhead film lights reflected there!
After seeing this, I rescind my votes for "Plan 9" and "Blood Freak" as Worst Movies of All Time. This is it. Deserves a rating of black holes, rather than stars, if ever there was one.
The actors are better than most cheapies, in that they can at least get their lines out of this plodding script, which even starts out seemingly more intelligent than most until it devolves into repetitious recounting of the pop psychology of our hero's sister's spiritualism in the face of the foreboding. Sister actually does a competent reading of a decent (if long, of course), eerie poem, so, though another long delay in whatever little action there is, I'm gonna throw out a compliment to her, which is the Only good thing I'll say about this, and a left-handed one at that, as ultimately it's just more padding. Our story begins with yet another long tedious scene of two guys at a bar, backs to the camera, arguing about "getting the band back together". As long as our hero resists, if I was the other guy I would've said a lot sooner "aright aready, we'll just get someone else!", but no, we have to hear out our hero's long-winded account of how his life's been paralyzed by this sense of foreboding that he just can't seem to shake. Besides being padding, my point here is that the entire interaction is shot at our hero's back, so that you barely see even the most fleeting split-second glimpse of half his profile thru his rock star hair the whole time he's speaking. Is he a Man of Mystery? Well, that's blown the next shot where he's shot face full on. Cheap, bad camera work? absolutely.
There's a consummately boring score of a solo piano repeating the Very Same Few Notes over and over, nothing else, ad nauseum. That, paired with that insufferable droning, is, of itself, enough to drive you mad (irritated, angry)
To top it off, the final shot is of our hero staring contemplatively into an ersatz zen meditation pool, at the overhead film lights reflected there!
After seeing this, I rescind my votes for "Plan 9" and "Blood Freak" as Worst Movies of All Time. This is it. Deserves a rating of black holes, rather than stars, if ever there was one.