The Dead Will Tell

Emily Parker (Anne Heche) is a lawyer in New Orleans. She accepts a marriage proposal and an antique ring from Billy Hytner. Her assistant Jeanie (Eva Longoria) senses something weird about the ring. She starts to be haunted by a ghostly woman and encountering past transmissions of the moon landing. She meets Billy's parents (Kathleen Quinlan, David Andrews) and his mother is not supportive. Emily starts researching the origins of the ring.

There is nothing scary. It tries to be a spooky little ghost story. It's functionally made. There are fine actors. They actually shoot in New Orleans which is nice. It's a flat little TV movie and nothing more.

Enjoyed this film and its location in New Orleans, Louisiana, with its historic old buildings, old homes and their antique furnishings. This film deals mainly with the spiritual world and a lost soul who is trying to communicate with a young girl, Kate Jennings Grant(Claire) and also manages to involve her boyfriend, Michael Arata. If a person's life is cut short, the spirit needs to advance to a higher spiritual level and this poor soul was definitely not Resting in Peace and caused all kinds of problems for everyone! If you like films dealing with Ghosts and the supernatural, this is the film for you, and especially around Halloween! ENJOY

I wanted to like this movie. I did really. It tried hard. And why shouldn't CBS give us a spooky Sunday movie near Halloween?

Still, with a feminine heroine in a new marriage, learning another family's secrets, it just seemed reminiscent of a classic Gothic novel (maybe it should have been a period piece - naw, everyone thinks those cost too much).

There's a real effort in the direction to give an unsettling atmosphere, but it had a little too much quick cutting (to keep people interested who have short attention spans?).

Anne Heche gives a more honest and effective performance than other actresses that might have opted for this project. But many in the cast - such as Christopher Guest and Jonathan LaPaglia - are playing characters that were not written with much originality.

The plot makes sense, and there are the obligatory scenes of hallucination. Nice set design and photography. Yet Kathleen Quinlan and David Andrews seemed too young to be playing Jonathan La Paglia's parents.

A distraction, a good effort, not bad - but not much that's different.

If you like ghost movies with a murder mystery like this I suggest:

David Koepp's "Stir of Echoes" (1999) with Kevin Bacon - based on Richard Matheson's novel (overshadowed because it was released near the same time as The Sixth Sense)

or

Sam Raimi's "The Gift" (2000) co-written by Billy Bob Thorton - the unexpectedly solid performances from a rather varied group of actors - Cate Blanchett, Giovani Ribisi, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear, Hillary Swank and the late Michael Jeter - make this unique.

In New Orleans, the lawyer Emily Parker (Anne Heche) meets the handsome Billy Hytner (Jonathan LaPaglia) by chance; they date and fall immediately in love for each other. One month later, Billy proposes her and gives an engagement ring he bought in an antiquary shop. From this moment on, Emily has visions of a weird woman and she decides to investigate about the previous owner of the antique ring. She discovers that the woman that is haunting her is Marie Salinger (Leigh Jones), who disappeared in 1969, and the police had found only her severed finger with the ring. Her fiancé Paul Hamlin (Chris Sarandon) was accused of the murder but considered not-guilty by the jury. Meanwhile, Emily meets Billy's parents and is not accepted by her future mother-in-law Beth Hytner (Kathleen Quinlan). Emily continues to investigate the murder, disclosing the truth about Marie's death.

"The Dead Will Tell" is a simple, but attractive ghost story. The cast is excellent, and Anne Heche is very beautiful in the role of a woman obsessed for the truth. This low-budget television movie has a good screenplay, nice locations, very few special effects and I liked this romantic supernatural story. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Quando os Mortos Falam" ("When the Dead Speak")

After receiving an antique engagement ring from her fiancée, a woman's visions of a ghost following her lead her to discover a startling secret about the past and its rightful owner and races to put an end to the haunting.

This was quite an enjoyable and interesting Lifetime Channel effort. This one manages to get a lot right here detailing the ghostly activity, which is first given quite a nice build-up here of the visions and encounters around town before going into the thumping footsteps in the different floors, controlling the atmosphere around her or fixating on the TV shows from the 60s that sets this one up quite nicely. These here are enough to work a fine atmosphere here when this one manages to bring about quite thrilling ghostly encounters are brought along early in here which makes for a really quick, breezy pace throughout here. That the first encounter, seeing her out on the streets just after the engagement comes about is nicely due to the quick time here, a later scene in her house where she follows the watery footprints to the window where she has a great encounter that turns out to be the film's highlight scene, another one of the car going out of control on the streets and a rather impressive series of scenes at the ruined studio which comes off rather well here in making the supernatural action work here. As well, the finale is really enjoyable here with the modern-day action nicely mirroring the flashback revelation of the actual crime as there's some rather fun times trapping her there and the stalking makes for quite a fun time. These here are helped along by the other big point here in the actual mystery which comes across rather well as the start with the appearing ghost following her, showing up in photographs and finally interacting among her life which spurs the discovery of the connection to the past by putting it all together and getting some rather suspenseful times here. These are enough to hold off the few small flaws in this one. The biggest issue to this one is the rather downbeat investigation of the actual mystery which tends to offer up an engrossing angle but is badly executed. There's little interest here in how the murder gets solved since it tends to run through the usual manner of spotlighting scenes mainly as a way to give her screen-time which is a big channel requirement. It's not as though the scene are all that bad but are just not filled with any kind of supernatural attacks or even ghostly activities throughout here, replaced mainly with scenes of her crying out for others or being tormented by the case which really lowers the amount of time here on the horror. It easily could've infused a few more encounters along the way to help out in that regard and still keep the same results which is what makes this a little disappointing. The only other flaw to this one is the rather lame story here that follows many of those elements simply to show that, from the family hospitality to her and the attitude of the cop that's all rather cliché enough to give this that familiar feel without doing anything else for it. Otherwise, this one was rather fun.

Rated Unrated/PG-13: Violence and Language.