Monday, November 07, 2011

Haunting at the Beacon

(2010) **

A couple who recently lost their son, move in to an old apartment house called the Beacon. Almost immediately the wife starts seeing strange things, like a child running into an unoccupied, locked apartment. Meanwhile, the husband plays hero to a has-been actress who also lives in the building, she is veeeeery grateful. Anyway, as the wife begins seeing more weird stuff, the husband, landlord, neighbors, the pope, etc…think she is going crazy. She finds the nerdiest guy ever who seems to believe her and tries to help. Soon everything comes to head in a not so exiting climax filled with corpses, cops and crazies.

What the hell is this, the ghost of Jacob Marley?

Mediocre at best, the Haunting at the Beacon utilizes almost every carbon copy scare tactic we’ve seen develop over the last ten years. We have the ghost kid in the closet and elevator, the quick run by the camera in the foreground, the crazy guy with weird stuff all over his house and a dead wife in the tub, the pop up ghost, the middle of the night “what was that?” noises and so on. I appreciate the effort, but it just didn’t work for me.

4 comments:

JPX said...

Sadly you could substitute that movie summary for a lot of "ghost" stories. I watched one that had a very similar plot and similar scares. These movies are becoming very formulaic.

Catfreeek said...

It really is unfortunate, good haunted house movies are really my favorite. So few of them work anymore.

Johnny Sweatpants said...

Jacob Marley wished he looked that badass.

Octopunk said...

The pope's in this movie? Slumming!

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