What happened to the last 84 minutes of my life?
What happened to filmmaking standards?
What happened to hope?
One thing that The Asylum films pretty much has going for it is consistency. 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck is an Asylum film in every way - but sadly, that's not a compliment. As far as found footage films go, this is one of the worst that I've had the misfortune of seeing.
And I'm easy.
The setup is similar to what we're accustomed to in films of this ilk, so I can't actually take any points away for that. The technical aspects of the film follows time-worn convention; it's pretty much what you'd expect to see for a micro-budget film of this particular sub- genre. Low light, jerky camera movements, and poor sound. Again, no surprises there.
Where this film really excels at ineptitude is in the low level of acting involved and in its extremely poor storytelling. For 3/4 of the film's running time, viewers are treated to excessive yelling, frantic posturing and hysterical emotional bursts from an earnestly amateurish cast. Bad acting has been a staple of this type of film since Blair Witch, so I for one, EXPECT it. However, it's the LAST 1/4 of the film that really bites; the actors collectively go into this whole other realm of over-emoting that I've rarely ever seen outside of a badly- directed grade school stage play.
Please people, for God's sake, take more acting classes. Improvisation is an art; please take it seriously. And if you know what's good for your "career", I'd suggest steering clear of films produced under the Asylum banner. Clearly, no good can come of it.
The atrocious acting in this film is outdone only by the extremely lazy storytelling which has characters making the stupidest choices possible and taking the most inexplicable courses of action. Repeatedly.
Finally (just because a lack of accuracy happens to be a pet peeve of mine), I'd give this film a huge "fail" in the research department. For the record, the building where the actual murders of the nurses took place was in a townhouse. Also, in actuality, Richard Speck killed 8 nurses in that townhouse, not 7 which this film repeatedly and erroneously mentions. The manner in which Speck's original victims were killed is also misrepresented in this film. There are more factual errors that I could mention, but chances are, you already get the picture. For future, it'd be nice if writers who work on dreck like this would actually take the time to at least get facts right, so here's a little shout-out to all those inspiring, creatively-deficient screenwriters out there that intend on tackling real-life events: it's not that difficult - Wikipedia is only a few mouse clicks away and it's freely available to anyone.
