A Haunting in Salem (2011)

A haunting in Salem is anything but original. Full of your standard horror tropes and clichés you'll have seen every bit of it before but done a whole hell of a lot better.Telling the story of a Sheriff and his family moving into a house with a dark past connected to witches (It is Salem after all) You'll see every scene coming a mile off and despite the budget very little of it even looks remotely good.The Good: Courtney Abbiati The Bad: Clichéd everything Things I learnt from this movie: A throw from a 3 story window will merely wind you

In regard to Shane Van Dyke's other Asylum projects, A Haunting in Salem is not as wretched as Titanic II(his best is 6 Guns, which still was mediocre at best). A Haunting in Salem is still very poor however, and shows that generally Van Dyke is far from a good director. His direction has a very slapping things together sort of quality and with no subtlety or skill, in short amateurish. But there are other things outside of Van Dyke's directing that makes A Haunting in Salem as bad as it is. It does look as though it was made in a rush, with slapdash special effects and make-up that is even less convincing than badly done children's face paintings. The dialogue doesn't have sense of life, flow or sense, and the actors certainly seemed to think so because apart from Jenna Stone(the only halfway decent thing about the entire movie) they give incredibly half-hearted performances. Bill Oberst Jnr doesn't deserve the unfair personal comments he's gotten but as an actor here he shows little charisma or passion. The story was especially bad here, that it's slow-moving wouldn't have been a problem if the scares were interesting and the storytelling compelling enough. But because the scares are so predictable and the story so lacking in tension, horror, suspense, thrills or fun the pacing just felt interminably dull, so it was difficult to maintain interest. All in all, a real bore and a poorly done movie all round excepting Stone. 1/10 Bethany Cox

The Downs family move to Salem so that Wayne can start his new job as the town Sheriff.They move in to an old house that has a macabre history, witches were hanged there in the 1600's.There's an urban legend that a family were killed in the same house years earlier.After a while the Downs family discover that there's more to the legend and to the house than the towns people are letting on..So it's half Amityville, and half the Shining, it's nowhere as good as either of those movies, but also it's nowhere as near as bad as what the critics are saying.It's rarely scary, and the film does consist of the lead actor (who looks like a bargain Viggo Mortensen) running around the house trying to get away from all the bad acting and the constant vomiting of his daughter.Obviously she is ill so weird thins happen to her, and then she becomes evil, but it will look like the Sheriff will get the blame, because all the sheriffs who live in that house turn evil.Maybe the Mayor (who looks like a bargain basement Jeffrey Wright) should have changed the locale.So all in all, it's not scary, baseball bat sounds are out of synch, and the village idiot has a stutter.I've seen worse, not many though.

Sheriff Wayne Downs(Bill Oberst Jr.) wears his pants pretty high,unfortunately though,not high enough to hide his dreadful acting.He has potential as a villain but his casting as a leading man in this story was idiotic especially as his wife(Courtney Abbiati)was unbelievably hot. Although she was some welcome eye candy,Abbiati was more wooden than the surrounding structure and provided some strange inappropriate smiles at the wrong times as though she was reading the words but failing to put them into the context of the film. To say the shocks were hackneyed would be putting it mildly,(how many times can an image in a mirror reflection be used?)the directing was unimaginative and seemed to be read from a DIY horror manual. Ironically the star of the show was the inanimate object,the house,although the two teenagers(Jenna Stone and Nicholas Harsin)did their best,Stone was pretty good in fact. The most damning indictment of this film is the fact that the house and the grounds were the most fertile spawning ground for horror imaginable. Every sprawling beam and arched design screamed of southern Gothic and hidden secrets. This proves to be of detriment to the film as the lightweight acting seems to melt into the glorious background creating an oddly vacuous feeling. More atmosphere in space.