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Nightmare at the End of the Hall
Canada 2008
produced by Jamie Goehring, Lindsay MacAdam, Joseph Lawlor (executive), Kirk Shaw (executive) for Insight Film/Lifetime Network
directed by George Mendeluk
starring Sara Rue, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, Kavan Smith, Duncan Regehr, Amber Borycki, Sebastian Gacki, Philip Granger, Christine Danielle, Duane Keogh, Matthew McLellan, Peter Huck, Adam Pateman, Christine Willes, Chad Cole
written by Nora Zuckerman, music by Clinton Shorter
review by Mike Haberfelner
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17 years ago, she saw her best friend Jane (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood)
hang herself in Douglas High's dormitory's storage room. Now, Corutney
(Sara Rue) has become a celebrated author, and the artist in residence of
Douglas High - and weirdly enough, she lives in the exact dorm on the
exact floor where her friend has died all these years ago. And the storage room,
which has been turned into another sleeping quarter, is inhabited by a
girl, Laurel, who is the splitting image of Jane (and is also played by
Jacqueline MacInnes Wood). Before long, Courtney has more and more
apparitions of Jane - which only sometimes have to do with
Laurel -, and more and more she's overcome by guilt, basically because all
these years back, she has stolen her boyfriend Brett (played in
flashbacks by Sebastian Gacki, in the now by Kavan Smith) - and she drives
everyone crazy with her assumptions of Jane still being around, so much so
that the school's headmaster Ramsey (Duncan Regehr) - Brett's father,
incidently - decides to relieve her of her duties and to watch over Laurel
herself ... which is when Courtney finds out that Laurel is actually the
daughter of Jane and Brett - whom Brett never knew about -, and from here
it doesn't take Courntey long to figure out that the headmaster has
actually killed Jane to keep his son's profile clean. And now he is going
after Laurel ... I don't think it's a spoiler to inform you that in the
end of this film, good triumphs over evil. Horror, done the Lifetime
Network-way, meaning the whole ghost story is a mere subplot to a
tearjerker that desperately tries to deliver some profound message
- but fails miserably due to an incredibly cheesy script that mistakes
soap opera emotions for the real thing, a very average (or even
below-average) cast, and a directorial effort that completely neglects
things like atmosphere and tension in favour of kitsch for kitsch's sake. So
bad it's not even so-bad-it's-good.
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