Sick Product of a Sick System

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good movie but grossly overrated

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Not much to say except it was slow and boring and not scary at all.

If I could give this movie a negative rating I would. This was horrible, just plain horrible.

What a mess. Instead of using flashbacks, letting the viewer tease out the mystery, the writers just plop it all out in the first 20-minutes. It's 1968, on an orchard in what is implied to be upstate New York (where oranges grow in an inexplicably arid, sun drenched landscape). A super controlling, former father and Hitler aide (or maybe concentration camp "doctor" as is hinted later), dominates his teen daughter and doormat wife. His chief hobbies: taxidermy (mostly of rodents), safekeeping Nazi memorabilia in the basement of the farmhouse, and spraying for pests, while wearing a leather trench coat and World War One era gas mask (producers hoping for a franchise character?). A delivery of a mysterious package containing an iconic amulet, and a letter from a Hitler aide (Hitler is apparently still alive in 1968) gets the movie off and running. Fast forward to today. Four vapid, boy-chasing, wine swilling students travel to the farm house to baby sit the grade school daughter of their college professor (David Naughton!). We later learn, in what may be a scripting goof, that the professor, his wife and the rather annoying child moved in to the farm house earlier that day. But, for no apparent reason they are now, at mid-morning, headed off on a trip, entrusting the little girl to the air-head students for a week.We then get:--20 to 30 minutes of incessant chatter from the girls, fueled by a raid on the household wine supply. --Later: more wine at a lunch-time picnic, some snooping about the barn and later the house, prying into file boxes and what ever else is stored in the basement and in a "forbidden" sewing room. --Next: wine in the living room, and the introduction of a medical sub-plot which is mostly unrelated, petering out after a minute or two. --Then the much predicted thunderstorm strikes and a festival of mayhem and haunted house cliches ensue! Here there are a few good jump scares, but that's about it. The end is unsatisfactory in the extreme. I had fun mentally cataloging all the unanswered questions and plot plight failures. I love bad movies. But if you are serious about haunted house movies, look elsewhere.

This started so well, Andrew Divoff, Darby Walker and Nina Siemaszko are a late 1960's farming family with a father who has a dark past. The acting is great, the setting well defined and the scenes are set for a great movie. Unfortunately, after this opening sequence we shift to modern day and it becomes another stupid teen horror complete with acting 101 rejects appalling development and a script worthy only for the lining for my birdcage. It's diabolical, and only made worse by the torture of hearing teenage girls chitter needlessly for over half an hour about stuff which doesn't amount to a hill of beans.It really isn't worth a more than a two short paragraph review. Trust me on this one, it needs a miss, give it one.