Conjurer

There's nothing new about Conjurer. It's a ghost movie, plain and simple. It's low-budget and doesn't have any high-profile star power. And yet — it works.

Well-acted, and directed with a deft sense for suspense by Clint Hutchison, Conjurer uses the tried and true formula of a yuppie city couple moving to the boonies to start over following a miscarriage tragedy, and sure enough… there's ghosts in them-thar hills. The family pooch Sam (played by Spot — I love it when the animal actors are credited) is the first to fall prey to the specter, and things go plummeting downhill from there.

The sinister atmosphere agrees with Helen (Maxine Bahns, who's a dead ringer for Maria Bello), and before long she and Shawn (Andrew Bowen, from Ice Age 2 and a bunch of TV shows) are celebrating the impending arrival of a new baby. Little do they know, something very, very bad happened to a mother and child in the very house in which they're now living.

Yeah, Conjurer is riddled with clichés. There couple does do inexplicably dumb things; cawing black crows (being played by Icarus and Fonzie) are the harbingers of doom; there's a mysterious neighbor (Tom Nowicki, channeling Willie Nelson — big smile, braids and all); and a helping hand who just may have something up his sleeve (John Schneider, a former Duke of Hazzard, and current Nip/Tuck guest star). There's no ground broken here plotwise, and the videography is severely hampered by flat, pretty much non-dimensional lighting.

But as I said, the movie still works. Why? It's genuinely creepy. There are some freaky moments that include a jarful of human teeth, the murder of a crow, and hair-trigger mood turns. CGI is used minimally, and the haunted characters ground their torments in fairly believable realism. The score is understated, and presented with with finesse.

If you are looking for a slow-burn, gripping little ghost movie you could do worse than Conjurer — it's certainly more effective than the majority of ghost flicks that have gotten a big screen release this year (The Eye, and One Missed Call, to name a couple).

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