Brilliant and touching

An action-packed slog

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Hoping to overcome her twins' death, a woman joining her friends on a weekend camping trip starts to believe her ghost is haunting her and her friends to unravel the mysterious events surrounding her death.This is a decent and enjoyable supernatural effort. One of the better parts to this is the set-up here for the ghostly connection, which manages to make it believable that these experiences are happening for once. Rather than simply rely on the traditional manner of loud shock- jumps or boo-scares to sell the point to her, instead here relying more on intuition generated from creepy encounters that build to a fine whole with the two encounters shown here in the scene with her alone in the house or going into the bathroom with the sludge from the faucets and the distractions coming from outside as well as the different encounters shown with her continually-shifting bloody finger-tips which makes for an unnerving tactic by making it pop up from pretty mysterious origins when it's least expected. That is based alongside the running storyline of the reappearing charm as well as incidental scenes with the clogged bathtub or the car's headlights going off-and-on for additional creepy moments that all build the ghostly presence quite well. From there, the final half to this is where all these pay-off nicely as the series of chases through the marsh, the digging in the torrential rainfall and the full revelation of the mystery surrounding it are all brought into clear play which makes for a few chilling moments and some rather enjoyable moments that come into play here. These are enough to help this one overcome the few flaws here, mostly the fact that this one keeps all these ghost encounters to such brief moments which leave this feeling more like a supernatural-themed drama of her pouting about the loss. There's never a sense of really exploiting the ghostly visions since there's so few chances to do this with them bring so brief against the drawn-out drama scenes that it really tends to crawl along quite lethargically for the most part until the finale so these scenes are disrupting that kind of pace for the most part. The other factor with this one that really sticks out here is the rather bland manner as not only is this once against the clichéd notion of being broken up to hide the storyline twist since the mystery of the ghost activities are the central point here but also that there's never a really interest way to get this one sorted out to become all the more watchable. These here hold this one down somewhat.Rated PG-13: Violence, Language and teenage drinking.

"Solstice" (2008) was made by the creator of "The Blair Witch Project", Daniel Myrick, and is a more conventional horror flick. Like "Blair", "Solstice" takes the subtle route with the creep factor and the typical trappings of slasher or quasi-slasher flicks; so stay away if you need serious gore, sex and nudity with your horror.The film runs 90 minutes and the first hour plays out like myriad other monster/ghost movies -- a group of youths venture to some secluded area to party and tensions increase as the creep factor increases. What separates "Solstice" from, say, most of the Friday the 13th flicks, besides lack of gore, is the serious and realistic vibe of the proceedings. While this is welcomed by me, it also makes for a less entertaining viewing -- for the first hour, that is.The last half hour is where everything comes together and there's almost a Wow factor as you realize what's really going on and what happened, etc.While the cast are all no-names, except Amanda Seyfried (who wasn't that well-known at the time), they're effective enough. They could've done better with the women, but the main protagonist is decent, Elisabeth Harnois.The film was shot in Louisiana.GRADE: B

After the death of her twin sister Sophie, Megan heads of for a few days with her friends. However, on arrival at the family cottage, Megan begins to experience visions and dreams. Is her sister trying to reach out to her from the dead, or is it something else....?Directed by Daniel Myrick, who co-directed The Blair Witch Project, Solstice has many things going for it. The cast are pretty good, with special mention to Elisabeth Harnois, as Sophie/Megan. On screen pretty much the whole film, meaning the film stands or falls on her being convincing, and she is very good indeed.The setting does give the film a nice atmosphere, and the story has enough of a mystery about it to keep you interested until the end.But as a film that is supposed to be a horror film, Solstice fails. Yes the setting is atmospheric, but none of the so-called scare scenes work at all. Myrick, who has made scarier films, doesn't pull of the scares here at all. In fact, I think the film would have been better as a mystery-type film, dropping the horror elements completely.Despite this though, I did enjoy it, and while it will never be remembered as a classic or highly regarded, I was never bored at any point and found it to be an enjoyable film.

I don't know what the budget was for Solstice, but no one is complaining about it's technical merits. It looks and sounds as shiny as an MTV video of the year. The cast is young and attractive--I would say they looked like they were straight out of a Noxema commercial, but I don't think those are around anymore. The plot contains a secret at the end and not much leading up to it, but that won't bother the target audience. If only there was a memorable villain, like Chucky or Jason, so that the kindergärtners whose parents allow them to watch anything and everything, could remember something to talk about with their friends. At least Jeepers Creepers had that flying scarecrow. The kid who played Iceman in "X-men" and the dumb girl from "Mean Girls" take a vacation to the middle of nowhere with a group of friends. Central to this story is Megan, who needs some time away to deal with the recent death of her twin sister. Except that she is having visions and experiencing unexplained occurrences that seem to be some sort of communication from the undead. Is it her sister trying to tell her something? Or are the messages coming from the innocent girl that Iceman killed last summer and then buried without telling anyone?You will only think this movie is original, well-written, or well-acted if you haven't watched very many movies. In which case, you won't care--you and your friends will be more geeked about having scored that six-pack earlier in the evening than anything that happens in any video you might be renting tonight.