Moving into a new house, a newlywed and her husband come under attack by a malevolent ghost that soon turns its attention to their friends, forcing her to discover the long-held secret of her return and stop the rampage from continuing.
This one turned out better than expected. One of the elements that's really impressive here is the fact that the haunting scenes are top- notch, delivering a lot of nice scenes. The opening dream opens the film strong with the initial appearance of the ghost delivers a solid shock with it's banging noises and really off-beat jump, as well as a couple of other brief ghostly visions from out-of-nowhere especially work. The appearance in the house during the walk-through is pretty nice with the unearthly noises that only he can hear, the gag with the mirror and the second dream-sequence complete with the disappearance and a brilliant gag to wrap it in, make this one a real highlight. The stand-out sequence, where the ghost attacks thieves inside a small van, is an absolutely classic using darkness mixed with the brilliant gag of flashing light intermittently to see coupled with the comeuppance of the gang at the end, which makes this so fun. The film's other supernatural action is also really enjoyable, including the two main hospital scenes. The first sequence with the levitating body in front of the priest while the others disturb the burial site is one of the better scenes in the film, as the surgeon's test where the ghost physically prevents others from interacting with the body is a great visual and comes off rather well. The action-packed finale where the race to get the ghost action resolved meshes well with the exorcism performed elsewhere, and a fun twist capped onto the end of it all makes for a rather enjoyable and exciting conclusion. Along with the fact that the ghost is actually really creepy with its faded eyes, blacked-out mouth and teeth and an eerie dark spot on its head and the great kills in here, these film's good points here are more than enough to hold up over the couple flaws to this one. One of the biggest is that this one really has a convoluted back-story that is so hard to understand, there are repeated attempts to explain it and none of them do much good. One of the biggest obstacles in that regard is that the characters in the flashback have the same names as the current protagonists even though there's no possession going on, along with the fact that it seems to wipe out the meaning of events after they happened and offer up a second, slightly different explanation for it all just makes it all the more confusing and incredibly hard to understand. There's also the flaw in here where the film's languid pacing produces a long opening at the begging as it does take a while to get going with its good scenes while there's also the rather overlong and unneeded flashback scene which just drags the film out a little longer than what it should be. These here are the film's problems.
Rated R: Graphic Violence and Language.
