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Directed by: Courtney Solomon Starring: Donald Southerland, Sissy Spacek In an age of movies where people are not fooled by special effects and gore to scare people. An American Haunting puts the bar far above recent horror movies that attempt to scare people with cheap scare tactics. An American Haunting takes you from the beginning to the end with non-stop intensity. You pretty much do not get a break from the intense feeling of being frightend except for about 15 minutes inbetween the transitional scene from 2006 to 1814. An American Haunting is the story about a family who has been cursed after going against the rules of a church by charging a local woman who everyone in town assumes is a witch a fee of 20% interest which I feel is robbery unto itself even in this time. After this the family begins the path into strange occurances and the film picks back up from there. This movie reminded me a lot of Poltergeist as well as the Excorcist and delivers a very frightening story. While you wont see any dismembered bodies getting chopped up by some new serial killer out there, this movie is pretty intense. Normally you find horror film to be broken up by bits of comedy to break the intesety of the film, but do not look for that here. There is no comic relief and I found myself searching for something to amuse myself with in order to break the hold the films stress had on me. While not trying to ruin the movie the ending was pretty weak and gave a brief theory of why these events took place. Over all it was well worth seeing and while not ground breaking on any level I very good flick. RATING: 4.0 PROS: Good Scares, acting is good, based on a true story CONS: poor ending, music used to scare the hell out of people, not really horror genre ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0429573/ Agent019 fucked around with this message at 07:25 on May 13, 2006 |
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May 13, 2006 07:22
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 15:48 |
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The Bell Witch story is really interesting and could be a great movie, but this movie is awful. Another horror movie that relies on loud noises and camera tricks to make you jump. PROS: Betsy floating and being slapped was hilarious CONS: Acting, jumbled story, photography in 1818  1/5 Just because I got some good laughs out of it. Ambulance fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jun 17, 2006 |
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May 14, 2006 05:10
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This is, without hyperbole, one of the ten worst movies I've seen in my life - and I've seen a lot of bad movies. You'd need your toes to keep count of the number of horror cliches to be found here: 1) Frequent "jump scares" that often amount to nothing. 2) A character in a scary situation that ends up being a dream (this happens multiple times). 3) Shaky camera used to create tension where there is none. I could go on, but the movie isn't worth the time. I will highlight one scene from the movie that illustrates how incredibly stupid the film is: The father of the girl being tormented and her schoolteacher discuss ways to thwart the "entity" haunting the girl. They decide that entity can only haunt her while she is inside the house. The scene then shifts to the girl's brother and schoolteacher whisking her away in a horse-drawn carriage. The camera then shifts to the perspective of the ghost/entity as it literally "searches" every room in the house for the girl, then travels about a mile in the span of a second to drop a tree in front of the carriage carrying the girl. I could not contain my laughter. The movie is the very defintion of formulaic. Here's how it plays out for 70+ minutes. 1) Daughter is haunted. 2) Family tries to find a way to stop the haunting. 3) Lather, rise, and repeat ad nauseam. This is only the second movie I've walked out of. Apparently, my girlfriend and I left only 10 minutes before the ending. I don't care how the movie ends. RATING: .5 PROS: Sissy Spacek and Donald Sutherland CONS: Cliche-ridden, thread-bare story, and just plain boring if you've seen at least one other horror movie in the past 20 years. Rabid Koala fucked around with this message at 17:21 on May 29, 2006 |
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May 29, 2006 02:19
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A friend and I went to see this because the DaVinci Code was sold out on opening night, and we got into the theatre while the father was being charged by the church, so I'm pretty sure we may have missed something about why the woman in 2006 was sitting there feeling all down and had a bottle of vodka on the desk, but I really don't care to find out, because the rest of the movie was so horrid, it couldn't possibly help. I think the only good thing about it was that we had a lot of fun making fun of it. As has already been said, it's incredibly formulaic, but I want to expand on that a little bit: Every scene (except for two I think) that involves Betsy being haunted takes place in her bedroom, and it's pretty much the same thing every time. Covers on the bed get pulled back, lots of screaming and getting pulled around on the floor by the "ghost", nothing really interesting. Then after this happens a bunch, the "narrator" decides to let us know that the ghost decided to haunt the father instead. So it makes him fall down on the ground and writhe a little bit. Then it goes back to haunting betsy. I wasn't aware that this film was made by the same guy who did Dungeons & Dragons when I saw it, but I wish I would have, because I wouldn't have wasted my money on it had I known. There are very few movies that I think are bad enough to deserve a 0.5 rating, but this is one of them. RATING: 0.5 PROS: It's kinda fun to make fun of, and I think the girl who plays Betsy is very pretty. CONS: Everything else. Seriously.
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Jun 2, 2006 04:19
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