An American Haunting

This allegedly true tale of demonic possession is weighed down by period detail and ponderous storytelling, which soon get the better of its Exorcist-inspired levitations, flying crucifixes and noisy poltergeist activity.

It's never an encouraging sign when a horror movie based on a true story fatally lacks the verisimilitude of, say, Alone In The Dark.

This is one of the more annoying, irritating, obnoxiously un-scary scary movies in recent memory.

This is the type of movie that you should be getting for free on television.

There's thunder and lightning and wall-to-wall music. But it still doesn't add up to much of a movie.

The dark force behind this movie is the relentless power of cliche.

The frights are few and the moment of horrific revelation is a big letdown in writer/director Courtney Solomon's cinematic treatment of Brent Monahan's novel "The Bell Witch: An American Haunting."

it becomes haunted by the unwelcome presence of heavy-handedness, making it seem more like a busy domestic melodrama (with a ghost) than a truly unnerving chiller.

Takes the most documented ghost story in history and doesn't create one truly scary moment.

This is proof that it doesn't take lots of bloody gore, big special effects or jump-at-you moments to scare jaded audiences.

Unoriginal and unrelenting, this gothic ghost story invests too much time in banging doors and billowing drapes and not enough in its characters.

Director Courtney Solomon's script is a catalogue of the standard Exorcist-style special effects, hammered home by Caine Davidson's musical score, one of the most irritating and nerve-wracking assemblies of noise in movie history.