“I really want to see this; it must be pretty spooky and have a great story considering the cast it’s attracted.” I said, as I handed over a chunk of hard-earned cash. More fool me. What a pile of crap. Some of you may have noticed my wilderness years here at the horror asylum. Trash like this is the reason I didn’t review anything for ages. Apart from life taking over and me needing to prioritise, to be truthfully honest, I was burnt out on watching shite horror films!
Haunted Echoes a “Ghost Story”, I use the term loosely. Is a low budget “thriller” that is so ineffective that they had to use a subtitle to classify the sub-genre.
Basically, Sean Young and David Starzyk play a married couple named Laura and Guy whose young daughter is abducted one night. Her body is found sometime later by a local boy who molested some young girls when he was a young boy himself. The boy was accused of her murder and hung himself in prison.
Laura and Guy move to a new house a while later and soon find themselves being targeted by a ghost who they assume is their daughter warning them that the person everyone thinks killed her was innocent and that her real tormentor is still at large and waiting to strike again. To be fair, the story is probably the strongest thing about this whole affair but even that gets ridiculous for no reason.
A long, convoluted and drawn out plot aside, the film is poorly lit with boom and camera shadows present a lot of the time (something I haven’t seen in the lowest of low budget clag) and the acting is terrible! I actually began to question if certain people (who shall remain nameless) are made to look good by editing on other projects, as they were shockingly bad in this. M. Emmet Walsh comes off best here but even he comes across as a drunken old fanny.
Meanwhile, back at melodrama central where Sean Young overacts amid a cloud of CGI drywall dust (I kid you not…think Susan Sarandon and CGI bees in Irresistible), things go from bad to worse as the leads then start acting like a couple of kiddy fiddlers themselves by hanging around their daughters old school bothering little girls, even going so far as to take one home under the pretence of having a present for her. I was almost glad they did however, as this ten year old outshines both of them in the process!
I wanted to like this. It was a blind buy for me. I put my faith in the cast and crew and they shat on me from a great height. I did see two even worse movies after this however, so it still gets one star, as they tried to make a good film with a good story so you have to at least respect that. It might be a bad film but Haunted Boat and Wilder were so much worse that I switched one off and fast-forwarded through the other.
OVERALL SUMMARY
You’ll have heard the expression that if you’ve nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all but I can’t help it. This was the shitty horror movie straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe if I’d have put Haunted Boat on first you’d be reading a rant filled review about that film instead but as it happens, that one was too bad to even write about.
