Other movies in this series:
None

Rish's Reviews
Whoa, Nellie.
This movie made crap like the When A Stranger Calls remake look like Hitchcock at his best.
When the movie first started, and I moaned that it looked to be TV movie quality, tyranist said, "Come on, I know you love Robert Culp."
Well, I didn't know how to respond to that.
True, everyone from my generation loved "The Greatest American Hero," and people in my parents' generation might have loved "I, Spy," but I don't really have any Culp-centric feelings one way or another.
And this movie sure sucked, regardless of Robert Culp.*
Apparently living in a 1973 filled with robots, computers, and a fully mechanized life, fantasy-prone Robert Culp and his fridgid wife decide to move out to the country, to the big old house owned by his ancestor, who was apparently such an evil dude, he rode a horse at night! As they're trying to fix the house up, some strange happenings occur, including a hippie musical number. So, is the house haunted? Is Culp insane? Does his wife have a split personality? Is he cursed to relive his twisted family history? Or is he actually possessed?
We may never know.
This is probably, no exaggeration, the worst film tyranist and I have watched together in the 21st century. Sometimes it's hard to adequately sum up a film without profanity or references to diaper pails and septic tanks. Maybe I shouldn't even try, since I doubt Chaucer could do A Name For Evil justice.
The film makes less than no sense. Bewildering, confusing, vexing, confusing, and perplexing, I might need a thesaurus to accurately describe it.
In case tyranist doesn't mention it in his review, there was a scene that began, talking about something that hadn't yet happened in the story, went on to the next scene, then continued twenty minutes or so later. Tyranist suspected a reel was out of place. I suspected the movie was just so bad they didn't care or think anyone would notice.
I'd Recommend It To: What? Haven't you been listening? The movie was horrible!
*In fact, it could've starred Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Gregory Peck, Haley Joel Osment, Abbott & Costello, Wendy Jo Sperber, Charlie Chaplin, Michael J. Fox, Ian McKellan, Samuel L. Jackson, Curtis Armstrong, and Grace Kelly, and it still would've sucked.
Posted: November 21, 2006

The tyranist's thoughts
It's amazing what the TIVO finds when you ask for horror. This showed up with a whole bunch of others right around Halloween. All of them were better than this. Nearly anything would have been though.
I was really getting into the sci-fi stuff. I love '70s sci-fi. It wasn't until then that they really started thinking about how life would not just be more convenient in the future, but in some important ways completely alien. Well, not completely. '70s sci-fi still looked an awful lot like the '70s, but at least it looked like a '70s that wasn't quite so comfortable as the real thing.
I might have liked that movie if they had kept making it.
But they didn't. Instead, they jumped tracks completely for a haunted house flick. They went from something intriguing to possibly the most difficult to pull off horror theme there is.
The movie seems moody and disorienting, both of which I think they meant, but it also comes up baffling quite often and never seems to resolve into something coherent enough to appreciate. Things were so choppy that I'd swear they accidentally got a reel out of order and either no one noticed or no one cared.
And the hippie musical number really was something to behold.
You ought not to see this one. It was crap. And if the TIVO tells you its horror, don't buy it.
Posted: November 21, 2006

Total Skulls: 25

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc.
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?