Movie Review: Haunted High

Synopsis: A New England private school is visited by the ghost of a dead demonic former headmaster.

So this is also known as "Ghostquake" but some other suitable names could have been "Horrible High" or "I Wish I Was High" while watching it. Did you know ghosts can cause earthquakes? Well they can. They can apparently do a lot of things I didn't know, except scare you. Because there's nothing remotely scary or haunting about this SyFy channel stinker. I've seen tons of their movies and usually enjoy them and know what to expect, but this is just bad. In fact I WANT to enjoy their films, but they've got to help me out a bit here.

Sure, my man Danny Trejo is in it, but he spends at least 45 minutes trapped in the janitor's closet. Seriously. And one of my favorite sexy ladies is also in it, Charisma Carpenter, but she's in it for probably a total of 1 minute. Wasted. But you do get some zombie frogs, which might have been sort of cool if they were animated, but they're really just flat, fake frogs being bounced on strings. Oh the horror. You also get ghosts who really do no haunting as they appear just completely in human form, except for bad make-up. One of them does have a pretty nice rack though (to make up for her horrible demon teeth). You get a girl pulled into a toilet as well, the same one they probably pulled the cliched script out of.

Is there anything at all to like? I did like the setting of the school, that felt real. I liked some of the "real kids" they actually got to play kids, instead of 20-somethings. At least they seemed to be real kids. And there is a pretty high body count (but most kills are off-screen and denoted by the blood splatter on walls).

But there's no suspense, only a few effective shots (a nice spider-crawl, wall-walk actually gave me hope), and nothing remotely close to a scare. How scared can you get scared when the main ghost is constantly making wise-cracks like some 2nd rate Freddy Krueger? Most of the effects totally fail as well. I know it's low budget, but even so they're silly (think the head explosion scene in Scanners if done on your laptop).

Anyway, this is closer to a slasher than a haunting movie of any type. And probably closer to a comedy than a slasher. Think a 90-minute episode of Glee, without singing or humor. Ugh.

2/10