Your past can kill you

Directed by Brett Donowho.

Written by T.J. Cimfel.

Reviewed by Deep Red

AKA Haunted Motel…

I bought this for £1 at Poundland. Now, there are many, many things you can spend a pound on at Poundland so parting with a pound for this, under those circumstances, was no easy decision; you should have seen the bargains on the cereal aisle!

Anyway, at the beginning a little girl is killed in the road near a motel by an oncoming vehicle. We then flash forward to some young good-looking people in an RV: Megan (Chalie Howes), Rachel (Chelsey Reist), Corey (Angel McCord Donowho), Kyle (Andrew MacFarlane) and Spencer (Johnny Hawkes). When their RV crashes, they decide to spend the night at the now abandoned motel. Rachel sees a little girl and follows her into the road where the girl stops. When Rachel tries to touch the girl, her hand passes straight through. Rachel is then killed by an oncoming vehicle, the man driving the vehicle, Matthew Hogan (Heath Whitelock), is badly injured. Megan finds a child’s shoe near Rachel’s body.

Cory is next to see the little girl, in the motel itself, and shortly after falls through the floor into the cellar injuring her leg. While Cory’s down there she sees two more ghosts, one of them, a women, slashes her wrists in a bath and the other, a man, tries to save her. When Rachel attempts to climb out through the hole in the floor she sees the little girl again and falls…

It’s an average film with good acting and a good story, kept me watching. I mean, it’s nothing special, but at the same time I sort of enjoyed it. By about half an hour in I was chuckling to myself about how Poundland had missed the boat selling this one so cheap (no, not really). I think the trouble is that while there are so many films about the supernatural around and many are a lot worse than this, there are also many at about the same level and that level is very ordinary. I didn’t think it was scary at all, didn’t make me jump either, and while it was interesting enough to watch there was nothing particularly memorable or rewatchable about it. There was a nice little twist at the end but by that time the plot had become slightly stretched and unconvincing.

So, worth a watch, but you might want to have another wander up the cereal isle first, just in case.

Also stars Rileigh Chalmers as Angela, James Tyce as Grigor and Stephanie Van Dyck as Mary.

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