Haunting At The Beacon (2009)

Bryn (Teri Polo) and Paul (David Rees Snell) Shaw are still grieving over the tragic loss of their young son, Daniel. They want a fresh start, and they want to leave the past behind them, so they decide to move into the old Beacon Apartments. Everything is calm and quiet at first, and some of the local residents are friendly enough, but as time passes, the dark past of the old Beacon Apartments begins to emerge. Nobody believes Bryn’s ghost sightings at first, but a series of strange events change everything. Bryn’s delusions become more realistic, and her feelings of depression and heartbreak could prove to be her downfall. The ghosts, who stalk the haunted Beacon Apartments want another helpless and suicidal soul, and Bryn seems like the perfect choice.

Teri Polo really tried to save this one, but she couldn’t. First of all, this film really isn’t scary at all, and the lame spook moments didn’t do anything for me. “Hey! Let’s have a bunch of dead people quietly lurk in the background, as they stalk their victims! We’ll keep using this technique throughout the entire film, because dead people with emotionless and menacing looks on their faces are SCARY!” Please. Haunting At The Beacon uses the same type of scare tactics throughout the entire film, and it really does become tiresome after a while: Dead people lurk in the background, they don’t say anything. Dead people randomly appear out of nowhere, but still, they DON’T do anything. Dead child appears out of nowhere, he runs away. As far as scare tactics go, this is the same formula they used throughout the entire film, and it wasn’t scary at all. These moments didn’t provide any jump scares, because everything felt so predictable and repetitive, and this formula does become very annoying pretty quickly. Also, the ending felt so underwhelming. The mystery was building towards something big at the and, and the story did develop at a nice pace, but the ending didn’t provide any sort of satisfying payoff for me. They tried to pull off a jaw-dropping cliffhanger at the very end, but the final moments of this film just left with me with some strong feelings of disappointment, and I couldn’t buy into the “shock” value of the cliffhanger.

Teri Polo gave it her all here, but the majority of the acting in this film is pretty bad. The horrible acting really drag this one down, and most of the performances in this film aren’t believable at all. Haunting At The Beacon is boring, dull, and this lifeless film really does feel like another forgettable straight-to-video horror release. For me, Teri Polo’s performance was the lone highlight in this one, but she couldn’t be the miracle worker for this film, because she was surrounded by tons of shit here (mediocre production values, the supporting cast was awful, noticeable plot holes, that can’t be ignored, etc.). Haunting At The Beacon did receive a VERY limited theatrical release a few years ago, and this film did spend some time at a few film festivals, but Haunting At The Beacon deserved a straight-to-Wal-Mart’s $5 bin release. This was an awful film, and trying to stay awake during this one was a real test for me, because the unbelievable boredom almost put me to sleep.

Final Rating: 1/10