Ghosts of Goldfield

(2007) *

I'm not going to muster up much for this silly Blair Witch knockoff. I was looking for something quick to watch instead of the debates, and this was buried deep on my Movie Channel demand package. So yeah, I had an inkling of suckitude going in.

Five college kids are off to abandoned Western town Goldfield to film a documentary about an allegedly haunted hotel. The lead cutie is doing her thesis on this subject, so she's brought along 4 friends to help her. The first shot was actually from the vantage point of this fake documentary, so I thought it was even going to borrow the found footage motif, but it didn't. Too bad, as that might have helped.

So they end up stuck in the haunted hotel overnight, naturally, and none of the story makes any sense from that point on.  The lead chick starts having visions of murders that happened long ago, and there's some hint that she's culpable via her grandmother somehow. An older and frailer looking Rowdy Roddy Piper makes an appearance as a toothpick chewing gruff bartender, and that's a pretty fun scene. But then you just get an hour of really annoying kids walking around hotel corridors with flashlights.

There's a minorly chilling payoff at the end when the lead babe gets tied up and tortured by the ghosts, especially since I was working under the assumption that she was playing the role of the lone virgin survivor the whole time. But she stupidly gives up some sort of magical amulet that was keeping her safe, and she ends up with a cigar in her eye. Oh well, it pads the numbers I guess.