The plot revolves around a family that moves into a old house in order to move their son closer to his cancer treatments. They find out that the house was once used as a funeral parlor run by a man who had a sick obsession with stealing corpses and cutting off their eyelids. That is when the strange things begin to happen. The son, being close to death, begins to see visions from the other side, and the ghosts haunting him seem to want him to join them.
Peter Cornwell directed a clod of a horror film, using the same simple scare techniques used ad nauseum, that produces zero frights. He focuses on being so gory and disturbing that it almost goes into spoof territory. The moment that you see a seance being preformed by the mortician and his medium is one of the single funniest moments in any horror film I have ever seen (and yes, that includes "Cabin in the Woods"). The ghost effects are so bottom of the barrel that they look more like something in a Roger Corman film than in a big budget horror flick. In fact, about the only thing worth watching in this movie was Virginia Madsen. She serves as the heart of the story, and tries her absolute best to keep they plot moving along, though Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe's script drags along at such a slow pace, it's a wonder we ever see ghosts at all.
Kyle Garner, playing the cancer stricken son, gives such a ham fisted performance, it is hard to care about his character for a second. The rest of the children seem to only be in the film for the purpose of revealing plot twists, and the sake of child screaming noises. The father in the film, played by Martin Donovan, was such a poor character that Cornwell didn't even find it necessary to put him in most of the film. Overall, the script lacks any characters worthy of watching, and even the loud noises when revealing "scary" things feels like they are just going through the motions. If you haven't seen this one, don't bother.
Grade: D
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