Obscure little 70s low-brow effort which will appeal only to hardcore 70s horror fans. A film unit is making a movie in a house where seven murders have occurred earlier. One of the crew finds a (supposedly) real book on witchcraft and raising the dead and thinks it's great to use recitals from it's pages in the film. Sure enough, the chants make a corpse rise from the nearby family cemetery who comes in to kill them all off one by one.
Absolutely nothing happens for the first 65 minutes out of it's 88-minute running time, except some cheap fake scares which make your eyes roll. And then everything else is rushed in the final 20 minutes, including a mind-boggling twist in the climax, which is so bad it will make your brains roll out of your ears.
John Carradine plays a caretaker (conveniently) named Price, 50s sci-fi hottie Faith Domergue grabs a lead role, but both are utterly wasted. (SPOILER ALERT) Carradine must be thanking his stars that he was the first one killed off.
The film lacks good production values (in one scene you can clearly see the sound mic extended on the bottom left of the screen), and the acting is atrocious. The absolutely slow pacing of the first half combined with nothing happening makes things unbearable. The one big plus of the film is the background score, which at times is oddly jarring, but tries to fill the atmosphere for the most part.
Not recommended to the casual 70s horror fan, nor to the Halloween fans. If you want a mediocre time-waster to dunk a few beers in with, this one is for you, specially if you want to doze off midway through. Rob Zombie must be thankful that the inspiration behind the name of his film is actually a forgotten, horrendous nightmare.
In the end, one mystery still remained unsolved - who the hell actually killed the cat?!
* ½
"You are gonna need a bigger chopper!"
Piece of shit. But an entertaining piece of shit nonetheless. It's SyFy, it's superbad CGI, it's got a completely washed-out Tara Reid trying her best to look awful, and it has one-liners which will make you cringe. But forget all that and just enjoy the film for what it is - a cheap piece of riotous entertainment. You can laugh your socks off and thank me later. Just don't pay for watching it.
Oh, and the next time you are attacked by a shark on dry land, try whacking it off with a stool. Believe it or not, it actually works!
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