Rating: 3/5
Hooptober 8.0 | 16/34 | From birth year 1/2
A cat’s shriek. Distorted organ music and pitch-shifted voices.
Sam Baker heads down to the basement. On the basement steps lay a cat with its throat slit. At the bottom of the stairs stands Henrietta, a young girl in a white dress. Crying, she holds a pair of bloody scissors.
Her father, Sam, punishes her for her sinful behavior, locking her in the dark indefinitely.
Back upstairs, Sam changes a lightbulb. The lightbulb stretches and explodes. Then, an axe held by gnarled hands fell into Sam’s skull.
Henrietta’s mother enters the room. The mirror bends and distorts, shooting shards of glass through the room. They pierce the mother’s face and eyes. The gnarled hand brings a kitchen knife into her throat, pinning her to the door.
Downstairs, Henrietta cries, holding onto a clown doll that produces the strange music.
Twenty Years Later
Late one night, Paul’s radio “goes crazy,” and he hears a voice calling for help. A terrible scream. The sound of distorted organ music. It happens again in front of his girlfriend, Martha. They decide to track down the source of the radio signal.
They pick up a hitchhiker. He talks about ghosts and fucks with them, so they force him out. They reach the location — surprise! It’s the Baker house.
When they arrive, they find the radio in the attic. And then they discover they’re not alone.
Straight away, Martha experiences similar phenomena to what the Bakers did.
At one point, a television turns on. Henrietta appears on the screen, unchanged since we last saw her twenty years ago. With her is her clown doll.
There’s also a guy running around who is also killing people.
The movie’s dialogue is hilarious. I had to fight myself from transcribing the whole script. I don’t know how intentional it is, but I was entertained.
This was such a magnificent scene:
— You can't know what's going to happen in the future. — Yes, you can! Cases of precognition have occurred! — Since when are you into that stuff? — About 45 minutes. I checked out this book while you were in the shower. — Oh — You remember Jack the Ripper? The psychopath who butchered seven women? — Yeah — Well, there was this Anglican priest who had a vision of the last murder a few days before it happened — Where? — In a streetcar — The murder took place in a streetcar? — No, the minister was on a streetcar when he suddenly had the vision! Are you getting stupid or something? — Look who's talking! Did you learn all that when I was washing my hair? — Are you serious? — Would you climb off your high horse? You know what? I've had enough. Goodbye!
Plot points rely on a passing knowledge of citizen band radio, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand — it’s not like the plot is coherent.
This movie is so entertaining! A bunch of weird shit happens, and it varies the haunting phenomena.
None of the performances are that good. Everyone delivers lines like a Shenmue character (iykyk). But everyone’s screams and cries are effective.
The soundtrack is so 1988 — it reminds me of the Goosebumps TV show.
The movie loses momentum before the climax while attempting to establish a plot for the events.
Still, this is a blast.
** Thoughts / Spoilers **
- “Did you find out who’s more popular in Denver: Kim Basinger or Kelly Lebrock?”
- “No one would play a prank like that — it’s unethical!”
- “Come to think of it, just about every place sucks.”
- “You should believe in ghosts, pea brain.”
- “Maybe there’s something supernatural about all this, guys.”
- “It’s like you get some perverted pleasure out of making things up!”
- “Maybe we never should have come here — this house is weird!”
- “The simple fact that the computer doesn’t know proves I’m right.”
- “Listen, people just wanna be reassured. Believe me. I mean, they don’t wanna know about ghosts and curses and whatnot.”