Pretty Good

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

A childhood trauma story about a woman who's parents died when she was very young and she was sent to an orphanage where she lived for years. Grown up, she living on a farm with her haunted memories and is a very devout Christian. News of a killer in town breaks out, a killer who's weapon of choice is scissors. The woman begins to think her uncle is to blame but is he? The question is: Who is the killer? A pretty good psychological thriller. I guessed right off the bat who the killer was but I was second guessing myself the whole film and I won't tell you who - you will have to watch and find out for yourself who the scissor killer is! Not a lot of blood and gore in this film - just a decent psychological horror-thriller to keep fans of the genre entertained.8/10

"Haunts" is a movie that put me in the mind of films like Robert Altman's "That Cold Day in the Park" and "Images" or Roman Polanski's "Repulsion." Stories about lonely women whose obsessions and mental wanderings leave the viewer in doubt about what is real and what's the result of the heroines' fevered imaginings, and that often end in violent acts carried out by the women in their own defense. Of course "Haunts" isn't anywhere nearly as good as any of those other films. It uses a serial killer premise as a red herring, but presents the protagonist's story literally, not even suggesting that there may be some doubt about what's real and what's not until what amounts to a surprise ending makes us realize that the woman was cuckoo all along. That ending is admittedly rather effective, but because there was no mystery leading up to it and the film itself is rather poorly made in most regards, it doesn't have much of an impact.It didn't help that I saw "Haunts" as part of a boxed set of terrible picture and sound quality, but I doubt that high def and pristine sound would have made me like this film much more. It's mostly just boring, which is one of the worst offenses of which a film can be guilty.Grade: D+

Once again, the 70's feels like being really weird with its titles and have them have nothing to do with the actual story. i love it. oh wait. no i don't, it's STUPID. oh well. Onto movie 9 of the Chilling classics box set.What do we have to look forward to this time? well some ultra Jesus loving chick named Ingrid! there's a bunch of murders taking place around the area with a dude with some scissors and soon enough she gets attacked, but she gets away and then a whole bunch of zaniness begins! like rapings and crazily boring scenes that don't need be there! hooray for the 70's! Supposedly Ingrid gets raped by this guy named Frankie. i say supposedly cause...well you'll see later. anyway after a while, the sheriff (who sounds like he has a touch of the throat cancer) and his cronies discover who the killer is and the good ol boys take him out. with guns...although he's unarmed. that always makes me wonder. why is it ALWAYS sheriffs in horror movies? to this day, i have never seen a bumbling sheriff in real life. do they exist? oh well, maybe out west. anywho, Ingrid doesn't believe its over because she thinks Frankie is still on the loose. her and her uncle she's living with takes him out. and all is well........or is it? Little do we know that she really didn't get raped and she made everything up with her craziness. what a twist! oh no wait...the twist was STUPID. and then the movie proceeds to go on for 10 minutes longer than it should describing what the hell happened in the rest of the movie. another reason to show that this movie messed up. it shouldn't NEED to have that explanation, it should be obvious in the storytelling. Even though i may not be a fan of the movie "Hide and Seek", it actually SHOWED us what happened as opposed to this movie that felt it necessary to give us a 10 minute dialogue because they were too stupid to figure out a way to show it.So the movie ends with the uncle going into the house and going a bit crazy. The end.Now, is it just me, or for some reason, why do all 1970's movies seem to have titles that have NOTHING to do with the movie. "Bell from hell" "Medusa", etc. i don't know WHY the 70's loved doing this so much when the film's alternate titles are so much better . The alternate title for this film is "The Veil" and granted, that ALSO has nothing to do with the movie, i think overall it's a better title than HAUNTS. because haunts promises ghosts or demons or something. Veil promises...well, a veil. and if there's no veil, i'm not nearly as disappointed.So yeah, another boring 70's movie. Not nearly as painful as Medusa, but hardly anything is.Haunts gets 3 pairs of scissors, out of 10

I voted 10 because i had a small part in the film (the bartender) and having been a big fan of Aldo Ray - younger gen's won't know that in his time Ray created the same kind of electricity in the film world for his unique approach to acting as did the likes of Dean & Brando (however short lived that electricity may have been)- I was thrilled to be able to chat and hang with him on set. Herb Freed & Anne Marisse were extremely kind and lovely people to work for and with. This was the second film I worked on in Mendocino, CA - the first one still has ghosts attached to it. Many LA film companies used Mendocino, CA as their location. Perhaps the most notable (and certainly the funniest) was "The Russians Are Coming/The Russians Are Coming". Many years later, TV came to town to shoot exteriors for "Murder She Wrote".