Solstice

I bought this to watch with my mum as we both love Christmas themed films. Thank goodness it was in the 'reduced' section - you have never seen such drivel. Hoping that things would improve, we persevered to the end, but were to be disappointed. The film quality was poor, like a mixture of home movies and CCTV footage, and there was no real story. Don't bother with this one!

The term run-of-the-mill was coined for this type of film. A film with no real inventiveness, one that has very little to add to the genre, but which expounds on all the familiar clichés.

It tries, but there in lies the problem. It tries to be too many different things- horror, teen road movie, drama, comedy and the end result is mixed at best. That's not to say it isn't well made or very badly acted, it's neither, but it's just so tediously average and not successful enough with its scare-tactics, or lack there of.

Only if the following things scare you will this film do its job as a horror flick...

Teddy bear key rings
Boxes falling over by themselves
Bad dye jobs
Tree branches swaying in the wind

For a film that's billed primarily as a horror movie it's surprisingly gentle. Granted, the score has all the necessary violin shrieks in all the right places, there's gore (in moderation), there's the array of stock characters (the naïve one, the funny one, the promiscuous one, the creepy one), but there really isn't a great deal of tension cranked up throughout the course of the film and the pay-off is banal to say the least.

'Solstice' also suffers from an incoherent horror premise, one that's based on one of the biggest clichés in movie history- the dead twin. There's only ever going to be one outcome where a twin is concerned, so in waiting for that to happen I found myself irritated rather than intrigued.

Megan and her friends, Christian, Zoe, Mark and Alicia head to her old family home in Nowell Lake to celebrate the Summer Solstice. The only problem is that Megan is still haunted by the suicide of her twin sister Sofie six months earlier. While shopping at a supply store on the way to the house, Megan befriends Nick who gives her a magazine telling her about communicating with the dead during the Solstice. Whilst in the house, Megan is haunted by what she believes to be the ghost of Sofie which is symbolised by a key chain that Sofie had the night of her death. While investigating the mystery hauntings, she starts to become suspicious of Nick and after finding a photograph of a missing girl named Malin, she starts to unravel an even darker secret that may hold the key to her sisters death. Throughout the film we are given flashbacks of the events leading up to the suicide of Sofie. We are taught that it's not just a girls way of getting out of a tough spot, Sofie is haunted by a curse which she desperately wants to get away from. This ultimately causes her to take a drastic decision that will effect Megan for the months to come.

Now being a straight to DVD movie I didn't expect much, I expected it to be filled with clichés and to be actually, not that scary. I was wrong as this was a film that a lot of the time gave me the creeps. I expected it in some ways to be very in your face with the hauntings from the beginning. It was nothing of the sort as it paced itself well, it didn't seem to want to be a cliché movie where the girl thinks she's going crazy and so does everyone else until they die or something ridiculous like that. It didn't rush it, it didn't treat the viewer like a child with the attention span of a sparrow. It paced the hauntings and built them up brilliantly until the climax.

The cast is strong with the biggest star in it possibly being Shawn Ashmore of X-Men fame. The acting is both solid and believable and the actors manage to draw you into the situation and make you a part of the situation. Elisabeth Harnois during the "six months earlier" scenes is forced to play both Megan and Sofie, which is a true test of acting ability. She does it well and the conversations and interactions between the two seem un-faltered.

I enjoyed the film and I know a lot of horror fans will too. It's not for the faint hearted as it has its genuinely frightening parts. Buy it and enjoy it, you wont be disappointed. I only wish that more straight to DVD movies were as good as this.