The Unquiet

Great title, great locale ( a real hospital, in Canada), and some great-looking women. But THE UNQUIET sinks for lack of anything happening of any interest throughout. Two teams of ghost hunters arrive at an abandoned and supposedly haunted hospital on the same day. They are rivals, and as I recall, the leader of one team was once married to the leader of the other team. What I was able to watch before dozing off, waking up and then dozing off again, included some of the gals (way too many females for ghost hunting, by the way) getting scalded by an unseen visitor and another gal getting hit in the stomach. Yet another gal gets momentarily trapped in a basement room. This very low budget Lifetime concoction apparently tried to emulate those endless, hokey ghost hunting shows on various cable channels. You never see anything out of the ordinary, but the ghost hunters sure get scared, don't they? This movie runs along those (very boring) lines. And the acting is absolutely atrocious. I have a feeling THE UNQUIET was thrown together in a couple of days, and nobody except the editor bothered to look at the finished product. Skip it.

I didn't think this little spooky film was that bad. Pretty silly I admit for 2008 and definitely had that low budget look and feel. The scrip sort of wondered off track inserting a couple on the verge of divorce finding each other and the ending was rather trite. It reminded me of some of the horror movies I watched in black and white as a kid. I thought the acting was plausible in the leading roles. Julia Anderson was quite funny as the drama queen physic. Considering the lines she had to deliver I thought she did a very likable campy job of it. It's not something I'd recommend but with the writers strike and the level of nightly television with all the reality shows I found it rather entertaining in a light hearted very predictable sort of old fashion ghost story way.

Known for her debunking skills, a woman and her team is assigned to investigate the supposedly-haunted prison only to find her ex- husband and his team there, but once they discover the real reason why they were sent there they try to get out before they become permanent members of the prison.

There wasn't a whole lot to this one that actually worked. One of the main ones is that it manages to use the design to perfect order and actually has a nice air to it that really is suspenseful. The design of the place, which itself is pretty great, from the steel construction and confusing layout to the just endless parade of doors and restricted areas spread within the floors, manage to work this one to it's best by making it feel really great. The only other part to this that has any good part to it is that there's an abundance of great scare tactics that happen at various points in the film and always generates a jump, which is always a great scene. These include having a bunch of off-screen banging of doors slamming shut, the ghostly whispering of women's voices throughout the prison ground or being overcome by vicious winds make for a great time while the fact that their experiences detailing the flashbacks also work as well, as they're in the same vein as those kinds of scares and even manage to get some good fun out of the layout in the prison. These here are all that work for the film. Despite there not being a whole lot to this one, there wasn't a whole lot wrong with it. The main thing really wrong is that way too many of the supernatural occurrences are talked out in conversation rather being played out. There's numerous scenes like this, from having the furniture rearranged to scenes of supernatural manifestations around them are told to everyone rather than experienced. It's really lame to experience the majority of the potential best scenes handled in this manner, which is just the absolute wrong way to go about this one. The fact that there's really lame physical manifestations when they do occur are just weak and completely non-frightening at all. The several spirit-possession scenes are weak and clichéd, the fact that all the good stuff was done in flashback robs most of the good stuff of their power and the other scenes just don't have anything to make them worthwhile or remarkable. These make the film feel really weak since almost everything that the genre is built on are either handled in really bad ways or not there at all, and with no violence or deaths to speak of, it gets a little further down. The last thing that doesn't work is the clichéd manner of their past relationships that pop up. There's no surprise that it all resolves itself in the end and seems brought in to beef up the running time with something to do when the ghosts aren't around. These here are what really hurt the film.

Rated Unrated/PG-13: Violence and Language.