American Poltergeist

At first I thought I was still on Pornhub. From the very beginning, the acting, dialogues, sound and filming were all ridiculously amateurish and tacky. The wanna-be actors couldn't even walk naturally, less alone talk. The sound changes from scene to scene and you could even see the boom mic at one time. The makeup artists transformed what was to be a scary mannequin into a sad grotesque clown and Donna Spangler, who plays the villain, should be banned from ever appearing on camera (I doubt anyone who has seen 5 minutes if this movie would ever cast her anyway). This piece of wasted film roll deserves to be shown to arts students to let them know exactly what not to do.

The horror genre is my favorite, but I don't know why after seeing so many bad horror movies. They say you have to watch a lot of bad ones to find a real gem. Well, this is one of the bad ones I watched trying to find myself a gem.

The cinematography was pretty good, considering it's low-budget, and that's about the only thing I'll say was good about this movie. The acting was about what you'd expect from one of these low-budget indie horror films. Unfortunately, so was the story. It was silly enough that it takes place in the house where Lizzie Borden killed her parents. And then they have one of the girls ask who Lizzie Borden was. Another girl says "Give her a break. She's a west coast girl." No, she's not a west coast girl. She's a stupid girl.

They didn't kill anyone until about 57 minutes into the movie. Considering the movie is 79 minutes long - and not very good - that's a long time to wait for people to start getting killed, and a lot of the victims appeared in the movie about 5 minutes before that.

I've seen worse, but that doesn't excuse this mess. I gave this a 3-star rating. I like originality, which this movie was, but just because something is original doesn't mean it's going to be good, as this movie is not.

When Lizzie Borden took an axe I wish she gave this movie 40 whacks.

The official definition of what constitutes a poltergeist would run something like this"a spirit believed to manifest its presence by rappings and other noises and also by acts of mischief, such as throwing furniture about". Within four minutes of the start I was already hoping that a wardrobe would fly across the room and scythe through the entire cast. I hope for their sakes that none of them EVER watch this film that they performed in as it would surely drive them to at least self-harm. The presence of Leslie Nielsen, God bless him, would surely have rescued this awful, awful attempt to scare us. My fascination with how dreadful it was grew at an almost exponential rate with each passing minute. The wooden policeman obviously failed his zombie night-class exam and they just told him to audition for any film that requires a semi-animated lamppost. One line in the film chilled me into thinking that the worse-case scenario was about to happen. What if there was going to be a 20 minute intermission without the possibility of a toilet break or even an ice-cream? What if the second half of the film then resumed running backwards to the beginning with people ascending stairs facing the wrong way and regurgitating chewed-up burgers from their mouths and reassembling the whole on their barbecue plates? That would have really spooked me. Mercifully the director had some shred of compassion for his(surely)captive audience and limited this travesty to a mere 71 minutes including credits, which is in this case is an ironic misnomer of the first order. The stampede for the exit will result in multiple casualties. You have been warned.....

This one has it all, bad acting, bad plot, bad writing.. You never get to like any character, and it had the feel of one of those porn films someone tried too hard with and tried to make entertaining. Porn film without the porn. It isn't scary at all and used every tired horror cliché. The back story surely could have been better if they hadn't tried to tack it to a real historic and researchable case. A little more imagination could have gone a long way. The acting is so wooden that it could have been done better with hand puppets, though in the case of the creepy house owner, that very much serves the story. I'm wondering if this was intended as a quasi comedy along the lines of "Birdemic- Shock & Awe" in that its so bad its strangely good? But this doesn't have the same kind of appeal. It's just a horrible horrible movie that has already been made a hundred times over. Don't bother with this film I'm sure there is some drying paint that needs watching?

Have you ever watched Mystery Science Theater 2000? This movie should be featured on that show.

However, as much crap as we talked while watching this movie, we watched the entire thing without turning it off. And then immediately clicked to watch American Poltergeist 2 because we thought it was a continuation of the first. Lol.

The acting overall was as if all of the actors were new, I was surprised to see they were in other movies. The overall story line could have worked if there had been better acting and better direction. But yet... we still watched...