Not even the welcome presence of low-rent horror stalwart Cameron Mitchell can salvage this tedious, incoherent mess of a film that offers up neither enough gore to satisfy slasher fans nor enough thrills to qualify as a thriller.
Mitchell plays the uncle of a manic farm girl named Ingrid who has the dual misfortune of becoming the target for both a scissor-wielding serial killer and a brazen sexual predator. Ingrid spends half of the film being alternately preyed upon by these villainous admirers with such ready frequency that the viewer can only assume they worked out some sort of visitation schedule ("okay, I'll attack her on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you can attack her on Tuesday and Thursday, and we'll trade off weekends"). When she's not being victimized, Ingrid spends long periods of the film's running time lost in nebulous flashback sequences, during which we learn that her witless caretaker may have molested her when she was a child and subsequently murdered her aunt when his transgressions were discovered. Meanwhile, the furtive slayer (who seems to be a fan of giallo movies, given his affinity for wearing an all-black ensemble complete with ski mask and leather gloves) is wandering around stabbing various ancillary characters to keep the film's meager action moving along. Naturally, the assassin is eventually unmasked, but since there's still a half hour of screen time to fill at that point, we then have to slog through Ingrid's anticlimactic confrontation with her rapist, as well as a lengthy and boring post-script meditation on her tragic final act.
Since Ingrid is clearly the film's focus, it's rather unfortunate that May Britt was the actress tapped to bring her to life. Britt's performance here is so flatly histrionic that despite the empathy our heroine's truly horrific circumstances elicit, she is ultimately essayed as a wholly unlikeable harpy--her go-to reaction throughout much of her ordeal is reeling around like an undosed mental patient and babbling incoherently. To be fair, some of these tics seem to be intentional (the movie attempts to infuse the happenings with an air of mystery by introducing segments meant to suggest Ingrid's ill mind might be manufacturing much of her nightmare), yet Britt's choppy accent and general maladroitness end up resonating as far more silly than stirring.
The willful stupidity exhibited by the supporting cast of characters is so baffling that even the most heinous deeds perpetrated in the film land as bad comedy rather than mounting tension. This is the kind of flick in which future victims have conversations about how scary it is to walk around alone at night with a deranged murderer on the loose, and then proceed to walk around alone at night mere seconds afterwards. Aldo Ray's prototypical small-town Sheriff is initially presented as a kindly voice of reason, but when a bruised and disheveled Ingrid tells the lawman she has been raped, his initial reaction is essentially, "well, wait a minute, are you sure?" However, the most obtuse groaner in the film belongs to Mitchell, who consoles a hysterical Ingrid after she has just narrowly escaped the murderer's blades by helpfully suggesting, "it was probably just a rabbit."
The story is padded with superfluous subplots in an effort to fatten the list of possible suspects, though anyone who has ever watched a murder mystery will likely identify who the killer is the first time that character is introduced. In any case, the obfuscation becomes essentially pointless when this aspect of the plot is resolved well before the credits run and the further misadventures of Ingrid retake center stage. There's nothing engrossing about any of the various cobbled-together elements, so by the time the storyline's central mysteries are tidied up, all but the most masochistic of viewers will have completely lost interest in seeing how everything pans out anyway. Whether you make it to the end or not, you won't be rewarded with answers to all of the questions the muddy narrative poses, nor will you ever get a clue as to why this film is called Haunts.
There are plenty of genre gems that currently languish in an undeserved obscurity; if you decide to investigate Haunts, be duly advised that this monotonous schlep isn't one of those. I sat through it, but that doesn't mean you have to.
Mitchell plays the uncle of a manic farm girl named Ingrid who has the dual misfortune of becoming the target for both a scissor-wielding serial killer and a brazen sexual predator. Ingrid spends half of the film being alternately preyed upon by these villainous admirers with such ready frequency that the viewer can only assume they worked out some sort of visitation schedule ("okay, I'll attack her on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you can attack her on Tuesday and Thursday, and we'll trade off weekends"). When she's not being victimized, Ingrid spends long periods of the film's running time lost in nebulous flashback sequences, during which we learn that her witless caretaker may have molested her when she was a child and subsequently murdered her aunt when his transgressions were discovered. Meanwhile, the furtive slayer (who seems to be a fan of giallo movies, given his affinity for wearing an all-black ensemble complete with ski mask and leather gloves) is wandering around stabbing various ancillary characters to keep the film's meager action moving along. Naturally, the assassin is eventually unmasked, but since there's still a half hour of screen time to fill at that point, we then have to slog through Ingrid's anticlimactic confrontation with her rapist, as well as a lengthy and boring post-script meditation on her tragic final act.
Since Ingrid is clearly the film's focus, it's rather unfortunate that May Britt was the actress tapped to bring her to life. Britt's performance here is so flatly histrionic that despite the empathy our heroine's truly horrific circumstances elicit, she is ultimately essayed as a wholly unlikeable harpy--her go-to reaction throughout much of her ordeal is reeling around like an undosed mental patient and babbling incoherently. To be fair, some of these tics seem to be intentional (the movie attempts to infuse the happenings with an air of mystery by introducing segments meant to suggest Ingrid's ill mind might be manufacturing much of her nightmare), yet Britt's choppy accent and general maladroitness end up resonating as far more silly than stirring.
The willful stupidity exhibited by the supporting cast of characters is so baffling that even the most heinous deeds perpetrated in the film land as bad comedy rather than mounting tension. This is the kind of flick in which future victims have conversations about how scary it is to walk around alone at night with a deranged murderer on the loose, and then proceed to walk around alone at night mere seconds afterwards. Aldo Ray's prototypical small-town Sheriff is initially presented as a kindly voice of reason, but when a bruised and disheveled Ingrid tells the lawman she has been raped, his initial reaction is essentially, "well, wait a minute, are you sure?" However, the most obtuse groaner in the film belongs to Mitchell, who consoles a hysterical Ingrid after she has just narrowly escaped the murderer's blades by helpfully suggesting, "it was probably just a rabbit."
The story is padded with superfluous subplots in an effort to fatten the list of possible suspects, though anyone who has ever watched a murder mystery will likely identify who the killer is the first time that character is introduced. In any case, the obfuscation becomes essentially pointless when this aspect of the plot is resolved well before the credits run and the further misadventures of Ingrid retake center stage. There's nothing engrossing about any of the various cobbled-together elements, so by the time the storyline's central mysteries are tidied up, all but the most masochistic of viewers will have completely lost interest in seeing how everything pans out anyway. Whether you make it to the end or not, you won't be rewarded with answers to all of the questions the muddy narrative poses, nor will you ever get a clue as to why this film is called Haunts.
There are plenty of genre gems that currently languish in an undeserved obscurity; if you decide to investigate Haunts, be duly advised that this monotonous schlep isn't one of those. I sat through it, but that doesn't mean you have to.