Nigel P A British teen horror then. Instead of posturing braggarts and plenty of arrogance, we have coy-eyed girls and clean, well-spoken boys. And a bit of arrogance. The wistful adolescent gossip concerning broken relationships and broken hearts that fuels any shallow character development hardly endears the young characters - although the cast do what they can. It actually took me a couple of attempts to get past establishing scenes rammed with 'as if' and 'whatever'.Six cadets - three girls, tree boys and not a blemish between them - take part in a night-time training exercise on the same evening two hapless burglars decide to rob the archives. The school they are patrolling seems to have had a gruesome history and so it is no real surprise (to the audience at least) when modest but effecftive horrific occurrences occasionally crop up.Of the burglars, Jazz is the downtrodden incompetent, with actor Ameet Chana injecting the same level of appealing ham-fisted qualities he did in his short-lived run in UK soap EastEnders. Will Thorpe is very good as his bad-boy co-conspirator Shane, and Rachel Petladwala makes a good impression as Meena Shah. In fact, the cast as a whole give good performances when their dialogue doesn't revolve around teen-speak clichés.As things go on, the pace improves but there is a distinct lack of tension and scares. Technically very competent but hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff, until the end, that is, when a few decent twists present themselves and the finale is nicely fitting thanks to unexpected parties. Not essential, but worth 93 minutes of your time.

Michael Ledo The film opens with an abbreviated history of the Great Plague of London then flashes to the present to the Dhoultham School for Boys. In a strange situation three star pupils from Dhoultham (may I buy a vowel?) are teamed with three top female students from Norfield. They are to patrol the school for ??? a gold star? We are informed this is the anniversary of a tragedy which we find out about later...but the implication is the place is haunted. In addition to the supernatural aspect, two bad guys choose tonight to rob the school's achieves.This is a successful formula for 80's films (with or without the bad guys) and normally involves, an old house, funeral home, carnival, mall, or bowling alley...my personal favorite. However in this one they drove it into the ground. The six main characters didn't come across as developed. A shower scene from the neck up....ummm...you guys have seen a horror film before right? The special effects, which were low budget, would have been passable if the film had some character. Could one of the guys have been funny? Heck, even a stupid fart joke...you know the one ...did you hear that? shh. quiet. POPF! This would have been an improvement, the dialogue was that dry.Guide: F-word. Implied sex. No nudity.

chet19 You might think it's a good thing that they avoided certain horror stereotypes, but in this film they really needed those stereotypes. For example, it was 6 teens in a haunted house, but no one snuck in drugs. No one got naked (on camera anyway). None of the killings was gory, and the main bad guy was shot and killed by another bad guy (meaning that our heroes really didn't do anything themselves). A teen horror movie with no blood, no nudity, and no excitement? Coulda been a lot better. There were also unoriginal things that didn't work well, such as the power being cut, creatures lurking in the background who are never explained, etc.

David Roggenkamp About three and a half centuries before the present time; an arc lord of sorts haunts a school campus and murders the four best students. They are murdered in the fashion of the time by the elements of fire (burned alive), air (hanging), earth (buried alive), and water (drowned). Fast forward and a bunch of military cadets are expected to patrol the campus on the nearly three and a half century anniversary of the incident. A few of them are on edge, the rest just don't know why they have to be patrolling the grounds. According to their commanding officer it is quite simple really - either patrol the grounds or they don't get into the college of their choice. The patrol has a few of the cadets that take it seriously, to the rest it is sort of a joke where they kill time. The patrol starts out with them as expected. There are a number of fake scares along the way, before those fake scares start to turn into the main 'ghosts' of the movie. To mix things up, the movie includes two burglars that want to get to the school's archive.I want to say more about the movie, but I ended up falling asleep during the middle segments - so I assume it wasn't that interesting. All I remember is people walking around with more jump scares and close calls that turn out to be false alarms.When I finally did wake up the movie was starting to get interesting again. I won't spoil it; but the four spirits are merely a sideplot compared to the betrayal that occurs. The cadets ended up in for a bit more than they bargained for, but what horror movie doesn't follow this trope?I found the character interaction to be a good thing; but the characterization implied the characters had a bit of an inner circle going on - something that isn't known to the audience. Otherwise the character interactions felt spot on as far as a movie is concerned. I didn't mind the jump scares and I found they built up a little bit of suspense and gave a false sense of security build up for when the real horror finally began. Do I recommend the movie? Yes - but be warned, the movie starts out good, and slowly starts to wind down as it progresses.Originally posted to Orion Age (http://www.orionphysics.com/? p=11516).