Review of An American Haunting (2005) by Alexander J — 14 Jun 2009

The film is based off of a haunting... supposedly. And while the movie does have a great idea in motive, no proper execution was given.

First off, the movie is way too repetitive. At first it gives some interesting phenomenon, going through the emotions of dealing with a specter. However, they try to scare you with the same situation over, and over, and over, and over... God, I'm already sick of this! It would be like if Mike Myers in Rob Zombie's "Halloween" did the same scare over and over, there's no point!

The acting is quite fair believe it or not, pretty accurate of the Southern culture and how everyone must keep each other comfort. However, the script ruins all this effort by, once again, BEING REPETITIVE. Why in the hell does the daughter keep on having a nightmare?! The director made her look like a retard! She's like "Oh, I had a nightmare!", OVER AND OVER AGAIN! Couldn't the director have been more creative than this garbage?!

Pardon my anger, I am just myself: the Very Mad Fast-Food Geek. And what I see here is a movie directed by a 12 year-old boy with few ambitions. Strong ambitions, mind you, but few. More variety would have really helped this picture presentation.

Let's take Rob Zombie's "Halloween" as an example. A lot of variety is given to the character Mike Myers, and his killing spree is executed perfectly. Because of that, the movie can be watched repeatedly, and there is not one moment of pure boredom.

In "An American Haunting," there simply is no variety, and the sound effects are annoying as all hell. There is new technology presented in the film, but that doesn't help. In fact, I think it made it worse. Why do the computer graphics look freakin' weird? It's just so obvious that it isn't real, and with so little creative ideas. What's wrong with just being plain with technology? Why do we need all this stuff flashing at us faster than a blink of the eye? The point of using a computer to make graphics is to ENHANCE the viewing, not to ruin it.

Let's take the well-famous "Kairo" as an example. It's a Japanese horror movie, and with very simple graphics. The camera angles are placed far away from the actors, and chills you to the bone with some very interesting sounds. Sure they are simple, but that's the beauty of this masterpiece: you don't feel left-out.

However, "An American Haunting" just looks real lame. It is so obviously fake, I can't explain it in my review. It just looks horrible inside and out. Even the DVD cover of this movie looks fake, and dumbs the movie way down.

In conclusion, this is definitely one of the worst horror movies ever made. You will watch it with interest, only to change the channel before finishing up the whole sequence.

-Very Mad Fast-Food Geek.