Spectre (1996)

November 10, 1999

by Nathan Shumate

aka House of the Damned

Directed by Scott P. Levy
Written by Brendan Broderick
Starring
- Greg Evigan
- Alexandra Paul
- Briana Evigan
- Eamon Draper
Produced by Mary Ann Fisher
Executive produced by Roger Corman and Lance H. Robbins

Ah, the haunted house movie. Is there any subgenre in horror more like a sonnet? The length and breadth are well-defined, the tropes visible for all to see, but within those strictures the writer and director are free to make silk purses or sows’ ears. (Hmm, maybe one of my Video Festivals will be centered on haunted houses in some year to come…)

In Spectre, director Scott Levy (Midnight Tease, National Lampoon’s Men in White) and screenwriter Brendan Broderick (Bloodfist 6, Spacejacked) have made a passable silk purse, although not without a few stray hog hairs unplucked.

First, a preamble with nothing to do with the rest of the picture: Two Irish cleaning ladies come to Glen Abbey Manor to tidy up before the new owners come. One finds oddly stacked books (“You’re right — no human would stack books this way”); the other finds rats. One credit for having a female character spy a rat and not scream; she just shoos it from the room. It comes back with friends. They overwhelm her. Her companion comes at her (now justified) screams, but sees nothing but her friend writhing. The hallucinating cleaning lady runs out, gets in the car, tries desperately to get it started (One demerit: I HATE cars that refuse to start for no good reason; HATE ‘em), and when it does — BOOM! — it explodes. End of unrelated prologue; beginning of actual movie.

The new owners are Will South (Greg Evigan, the guy from BJ and the Bear, My Two Dads, and TekWar), his wife Maura (Alexandra Paul of Cyber Bandits and the remake of Piranha), and their daugher Aubrey (Briana Evigan — guess who she’s related to). Oddly enough, Evigan the Elder and Paul both were on Melrose Place, though in different seasons.

Anyway. They inherited the place through Maura, whose maiden name is Londrigan, the name of the constructors of the house 100 years past. (One century? One measly little century? That may be old here in the States — in Ireland, that’s another one of those “newfangled tract houses”!) They move from the U.S. to occupy it, bringing baggage of a different sort; they’re recovering from an infidelity on Will’s part (shades of Castle Freak).

As soon as they get there, naturally, it’s Aubrey who starts picking up on spirit things; she finds an old porcelain doll with red hair and a pullstring (a porcelain doll with a pullstring? Never mind). She pulls it. It says, “I’m Colleen. What’s your name?” “Aubrey.” “Hello, Aubrey.”

Now, I had to get that sinking feeling right about here. There is one problem that every haunted house movie has to solve: How do you keep the characters in the sinister house for the entire movie? The three standard solutions are 1) pay them to stay, 2) trap them somehow, or 3) make sure that there are skeptical characters who refuse to believe the superstitious nonsense until the last twenty minutes. Since early contact between a child and a spook is normally a sign of 3), I began to feel pessimistic; no one likes to watch a whole movie of stubborn rationalists repeating ad nauseam, “There’s got to be a reasonable explanation…”

But joy! Ten minutes later, the parents saw a semi-visible thing with red eyes menacing Aubrey in her bed. (One more demerit: The CGI creature looked just like a CGI creature — sort of like a midget Predator with his cloak on. More distracting than convincing.)

Let’s move through the plot quickly here:

The parents call in a psychic investigator, who discovers that the spirit of Colleen Londrigan is still in the house because her tortured body was walled up in the cellar, victim of her Satanic parents’ rites.

They take the body out and give it a good Christian burial, thinking that will be the end of it. But at the dinner they have with the investigator, his assistant, and the old priest, full-blown Exorcist things start happening: Crockery is thrown around, lights flash on and off, and Aubrey disappears. The evil spirits have her, apparently taken in trade for the laid-to-rest Colleen.

There’s a lot more going on here, including a large plot point that centers on the spirits’ ability to gain power from mistrust and resentment (remember that infidelity?).

All through (gasp!), people are given a good reason to be in the house when creepy crap happens. Whatever other flaws the film had (a reliance on the deus ex machina of a couple of mystical artifacts in the priest’s possession, for example), that alone reserves a place of honor in the pantheon of haunted house movies.