During March, I will be reprinting select horror movie reviews from Conditional Axe as that blog nears the end of its lifespan. A best-of collection that will extol the virtues of the genre as well as excoriate Tom Sizemore, Nicolas Cage and Uwe Boll. Today’s post is originally from January 2007, and was originally entitled “Your Haunted House and You.”
Last night I watched a movie called The Spirit Trap, a film about Billie Piper and a few other young, pretty Britons who move into a haunted house. As young people are wont to do, they futz with the native spirits, people die, and Crazy Haunted Shit goes down. Honestly, the movie was pretty boring and forgettable, except for the part where a guy gets impaled by the pendulum of a clock. I have to hope that Piper made this movie before Dr. Who, and not after, because that would not be a step in the ‘right direction.’
Concerns about Ms. Piper’s life choices aside, it’s troubling to me just how many stupid young people find themselves in an inescapable, haunted death trap. I mean, it’s a common theme in film and literature, so it must happen all the time in real life. Because I believe in education, I am going to impart some easy lessons that should prevent this sort of thing in the future.
1. If a woman wants to sleep with you in an obviously creepy locale, you may want to consider ending the relationship and encouraging her to seek psychiatric help. This works the other way around, too, ladies.
2. Ouija boards = bad idea. To comment further presumes that you’re too dumb to benefit from help anyway.
3. A haunted house is a bad place to commit a murder. If you need to kill someone, there are better places to do it, like down near the soup kitchen. It turns out, at least, based on a multitude of bad ghost movies, that many ghosts are hanging around due to an unresolved traumatic death. Causing another unresolved, traumatic death in front of them will likely make them cranky.
4. Never assume that a ghost is friendly. Especially if it takes the form of a precocious little girl.
5. When bizarre things start to happen, do not investigate. It is time to, as the kids say, GTFO.
6. If you find a device or heirloom with strange symbols on it, do not play with it or try to fix it.
7. If someone wants you to stay the night in a place where eleventy billion people died in a fire caused by a riot caused by some sort of inhuman cruelty, punch them in the face as hard as you can.
8. Really, just stay out of the bathroom. Even if your housemates start to call you a hippie. If you have to bathe, shower only.
9. Locked rooms and hidden doors – avoid at all costs.
10. Nothing in the basement is ever worth investigating. Not dead bodies, not torture chambers, not hidden pirate gold. If you need something out of the basement, get someone you don’t like to do it.
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