LoupGarouTFTs I have to agree with the other reviewers that the movie was a send-up of The Shining, with lots of grass around instead of snow. The film had a kind of grainy, low budget feel to it, which I thought added to the element of creepiness quite a lot. It also had a bit of earthiness lacking in a lot of American films. Overall, I thought it was an enjoyable film.I think that Secret Window may have borrowed a small element, in the form of the police officer. When Amanda Plummer visits the retired officer, she finds him painting and comments that it's not quite the thing you'd expect from a police officer. Mort Rainey finds the sheriff doing embroidery. Nifty, that.A shame about the dog, though. Seven out of ten for being a good, solid, creepy film--even if it didn't have a huge amount of original material.

hershiser2 I'm always looking for a good haunted house/ghost flick, and I have to say I haven't seen a good new one in years. Instead of something new, here we have a movie that borrows aspects and ideas from a bunch of other haunted house/horror flicks and combines them into one... making this very unoriginal and very dull. Watch The Shining, Poltergeist, The Changeling, Amityville Horror, and others instead of watching this rip off flick.

Backlash007 ~Spoiler~ I applaud 7 Days to Live. I don't applaud it for being a clone of The Shining, but for the efforts behind this film. It's the story of a writer and his wife who move into a haunted house to get away from everything and eventually he is driven mad. And the house, of course, has been built over a mass grave. That's The Shining comparison and the cliched bit. But it does generate its own genuinely creepy moments. The opening scene is bone chilling and will have you hooked from the start. Also, Sean Pertwee doing his best Jack Nicholson is reason enough to see the movie. With 7 Days, Pertwee has done two great horror movies recently (if you haven't seen Dog Soldiers I suggest you do so). Another familiar face is Sean Chapman...that's right, Frank Cotton in the flesh. I didn't fully recognize him until there was a scene with Chapman in it that mirrored Hellraiser (the moving furniture/bloody hand scene). It's too bad the hellraising actor didn't have a bigger part though. By the end of the film, you should recognize a few more horror movies stitched in here but it's all a bit of foreign fun. 7 Days to Live is worth catching if you enjoy the films in between the Hollywood hype and the direct-to-video garbage.

Poe-17 This film is like browsing in the fridge, late at night when you have the munchies; there's a piece of pizza, a slice of meatloaf, a spoonful of potato salad, a deviled egg ... stuff you've had before that doesn't add up to a proper meal. Genre buffs might have some fun spotting the past film's this movie borrows it's scenes from and there are a lot of them. I did. This is Frankenfilm, stitched together from limbs and parts of other films, a dog here, a basement there, a creeping insanity here, a dark ooze from the floor, wraiths, a marriage sabotaged by the supernatural. There are scenes in the movie that would have sizzled if that sizzling hadn't already been burned into our cinematic psyche by better movies. Still I found it hard to hate this movie. I'm not sure why. It didn't have heart and didn't even pretend to lunge for new ground. I suppose those of us who love horror in cartoons, poetry, fiction or film don't mind rummaging around in the old and familiar. I know that while watching this movie it reminded me of how much I liked this or that movie and caused me to want to rent them and see them again. I would advise everyone to not bother (a caution that is lost on the diehard aficionado - we will watch anything in hopes of finding even one "nugget" to remember). I'm happy to report this film has one such nugget and frustrated to report it is a structurally cruel and wasted nugget. That nugget is the film's first five minutes. Watching it I remember settling into my chair and bracing myself. I thought, this might, maybe, perhaps, potentially could be one of those small films where those involved have a dark and sinister bent and are going to take you on a wicked roller coaster ride rocketing and ricocheting through a sidestreet of hell ... but no. I dont' want to say anything else about the film's beginning since that is the movie's shot at redemption though it redeems not. It commits a fatal error, it packs its wallop at the beginning instead of the end. Don't bother, unless you like snacking unrelated leftovers from the fridge or leafing through family picture albums.