[Seance]
Plot:Over Thanksgiving weekend, all but five students in an old Manhattan building that's now a college dormitory leave for home: staying on one floor are roommates Lauren, Melina, and Alison, plus her boyfriend Diego and Grant, a loner in a room down the hall. Lauren's been seeing things in her bathroom: a silent child of about six. Diego has written a paper on parapsychology, so he holds a séance with the disbelieving co-eds. Something goes awry, because bad things start to happen and the students' only defender is an aging campus cop named Syd. What's the silent ghostly girl's secret, and can Alison discover what's going on before it's too late?

Cast:Kandis Erickson, Bridget Shergalis, Tori White, Chauntal Lewis, Brandon Smith, Jack Hunter, Emily O'Brien, Joel Geist, A.J. Lamas, Adrian Paul, Ruby Garson, Andrew Welsh, Mike Kimmel, Kate Robbins, Martin Szumanski.

My Thoughts:They don't get any worse than this.

Review:Sometimes you see a horror film that's so ludicrous, and so ridiculous that you wonder to yourself..."How in the hell did this picture get any funding at all?" Well, that's how I felt about Mark L. Smith's "Seance". The movie has the typical set up for a recipe for disaster. Three supposedly hot coeds, a male friend who wants to get in their pants, a horny middle-aged security guard, and a loner on the same floor who doesn't give a shit about any of them. After being introduced to the central characters of the film, I kind of understood why the loner dude just wanted to chill in his drom room and not chit-chat with anybody. The pic I will admit, does try and be clever right at the very start. See the three girls have a fourth roommate, but she's not human.

She's a ghost, the ghost of a little girl who fell down the elevator shaft ages ago, and every now and then...decides to screw with the three girls while they're sleeping - by doing things like turning the water on and off in the bathroom, and of course dealing out the occasional waking nightmare to the blonde member of the trio. The little girl ghost seems friendly enough though, well.....she hasn't tried to kill anyone yet that is. Although her appearance does occasionally freak out the teens considering the girl appears in the form of an apparition with it's neck bent all the way to the left side of it's body.

But this peaceful, or somewhat peaceful co-existence between human and apparition, is apparently not good enough for the girls. They want to know the backstory behind their little female friend, and so they coax their male friend Diego into aiding and abetting a seance, in which they try and contact the little girls spirit to fidn out more about her. Pretty genius idea eh? Now we all know what happens in a horror film when some clownasses fucking around with seances. Seances are like cheating on your girlfriend with her sister and best friend at the same time...it's a situation that NEVER turns out well...not EVER.

The trio of twits, and their dim bulb male companion learn this lesson the hard way, as during the seance...things get a bit too spooky...causing them to call it off. But of course, a malevolent spirit has already found it's way into the world of the living by then and so, they're pretty much screwed at this point. It's films like this that make the horror genre roll over in it's proverbial grave. Seances are a very creepy set up for a horror film, but I've yet to encounter a horror film to use the seance aspect smartly.

Rather than having a bunch of moronic teens screw around with a Ouija board and end up pulling a huge "oops...my bad" by releasing a great evil. The same happens in this movie, and this after the little girls ghost warns the girls "6th sense" style not to fuck around with the spirit world. But they don't listen, and refuse to heed her warnings because after all...they're boozed up college students with the entire floor to themselves for the thanksgiving break...and she's just some ghost from the netherworld...what the hell does she know anyway right? "Sigh"...if only the writer of this movie had watched "Poltergeist" to see how supernatural horror is properly done.

The most hilarious moment of the film comes when the four idiots somehow manage to rope the loner guy into their hijinx. He of course scolds them for their abhorently retarded actions, but agrees to help them exorcise the evil spirit from the dorm anyways....albeit somewhat reluctantly. After all, when the dean returns, he's gonn be super pissed if there's a ghost killing off the student body, and that's the kind of thing that can really be a bitch around finals week..."shakes head in disgust". The ghost in the movie is not even worthy of any awards other than maybe a razzy or two.

He's just some dead janitor who whistles a little diddy every time he's "around"...and he also holds a connection to the dead little girl, which after that is revealed...is when this film starts to look alot like Anthony C. Ferrante's "BOO". It's a pretty sad day when a direct-to-dvd film has to rip off another direct-to-dvd film to come up with a backstory for it's ghostly villain. Between the pathetically unscary ghosts, and the stupid characters, you can't help but only feel sorry for the loner and the parrot...(yes there is a parrot in this movie...go figure). "Seance" is a major league waste of time...it's a bad horror film, a bad ghost film, a bad scary movie, just a bad everything.

Positives:The loner character has his moments, the parrot rocked.

Negatives:Bad script, bad acting, stale same old same old story, just all around a poor job on everything.

Overall:Start up your own seance so you can send this one back to the video store for all eternity.





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