Pretty Good

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Journeying to a house in the countryside, a group of parapsychology students and their professor find the area's past as a home for demonic entities has been unleashed and causing them to wonder if what they see is really there.This here is a rather enjoyable and somewhat entertaining effort that has some rather impressive moments but still has some minor flaws present. Among the good parts is the fact that the film clearly has a lot of ideas present about what it really wants to be, and that manifests itself in a really chaotic framework here with all sorts of creepy things going on. From the drive out into the hillside with a decrepit, run-down house that really should not be visited by anyone, the creepy procedures that must be followed before the séance scenes, all sorts of rather freaky scenes being utilized before getting into the twist involving the real reason they're there and the ensuing reactions they have because of this, which really drives this one all over the place but really remains quite level-headed about itself. There's never any real sense about this being too confusing or obscure in what it does to really hinder it all that much during these scenes by keeping the story lines going rather well, never really putting itself in place to become too confusing since the streamlined second-half keep their actions on target with how the rest of the movie has been going along, and this in turn forces the stories into pretty entertaining versions. By doing these different stories, it also brings about the enjoyable manners of forcing them into the story, so there's all sorts of rather creepy hallucinations and different settings about this being utilized for maximum effect, including the scenes down in the underground tunnels and the whole final half being a fine action-packed race to keep things on track as this heads into a rather inventive twist that really sells this quite well. However, there's still a few problems with this one in the fact that, despite how well it handles things, the film never really can settle on what it really wants to be because it has so many different elements wrapped inside it. Being a film about a creepy old house that was used to summon satanic demons first, then it turns into a demented captor forcing his students to do what he pleases and then finally an alien pod story that gets shoehorned into the film in an attempt to showcase a few nasty special effects scenes and then tries to make all these story lines make sense and it does so only through the finale's twist so this can get a little confusing with all the different elements in here. As well, the film does take a while to get going with there being quite a lot of useless time leading up to the house visit and forcing this to take a long time really getting going. Otherwise, this one wasn't all that bad.Rated R: Language and Graphic Violence.

A professor (Jack Starrett) and four graduate students journey to a crumbling mansion to investigate paranormal activity and must battle ghosts, aliens and satanic entities.While there is no star in the cast, no famous writer or director or producer, it is worth noting that the special effects are from KNB, probably the best guys in the business. Somebody knew somebody to get those guys on board with this project.I do like in the opening that the students try to dream of things that terrify them -- such as cannibalism -- and are attempting to project their own death. This plays off the old idea that you cannot die in your dream without dying in real life. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not. But it makes a good background to build off of.Bonus: When one student screams, "The doctor is an alien!"

When I picked the unrated version of this stupid piece of sci-fi junk up in a video store, I thought I'd really like it a lot. The box made it look like one of those movies where anything can happen (due to a plot rooted in the dream-vs.-reality subgenre), which the freaky pictures seemed evidence of. It was the unrated version, so I thought I'd give it a look. Expecting an imaginative and scary film, I got what turned out to be the opposite. Even the original ideas it could have done so much with don't seem original when the movie is boring dreck. It quickly sinks into another boring plot about aliens impersonating people, with only one truly creepy moment out of the entire film ("Do I look dead to you?"). As far as the rest of it goes, the only other redeeming point (and the biggest enigma of the film) is that, regardless of whether you're enjoying it or not (which I wasn't), it oddly manages to maintain a feel of heavy dread (with no real pay-off, of course). Furthermore, why was this unrated? I have seen so many R-rated films of times recent and old that have much nastier stuff in them than this film has. (Not that I think a movie has to be gory to be good, but it would have at least livened up this crappy movie.) I would have to recommend this more to sci-fi fans than horror fans, but even the many sci-fi fans I've known would probably hate this stupid movie.

I have seen many a horror flick in my time, all of them absurdly bad, but none reach the depths that this piece of trash lowers itself to. This movie made me angrier and angrier as I watched it as I tried to wrap my head around exactly what this movie was about. Now, after I've seen it, I understand - sort of - what was going on and why, but the movie itself is just too confusing to be enjoyable when you're watching it. Yes, there are the customary scenes of gratuitious violence, one-liners that show the mind-blowing insightfulness of its characters ("The highway belongs to me...ME!"), and enough nudity to sufficiently distract us from the "plot", but still you'll leave this movie feeling alone and taken advantage of, like a puppy who isn't wanted anymore and is left in a box by the side of the road. Blech.