Haunted High

Haunted High (2012)

1/2 (out of 4)

The setting is a high school in New England where an old headmaster's spirit comes back to haunt and kill the students. It turns out this guy and his assistants were doing human sacrifices at the school and their spirits are back for some fun. HAUNTED HIGH is another incredibly stupid, incredibly bad movie from SyFy, which has very few redeeming factors. I knew I was in trouble because I was already bored out of my mind before the opening credits even started. Look, I know not to expect quality when it comes to turning into SyFy on Saturday nights at 9pm but at the same time I at least want to be entertained. This film here is pretty much useless to horror fans for a number of reasons but the biggest is that it's certainly not scary. I love ghost movies but this here will probably go down as one of the worst I've ever seen. For starters, as I said it's not scary but even worse is the fact that the CGI ghosts are all lame and the effects just don't work. It also doesn't help that the headmaster says bad jokes and his assistant is more annoying than anything else. The death scenes are all forgettable and the majority of the characters are just bland. I will say that I enjoyed Lauren Pennington so let's hope she get more and better work in the future. I also enjoyed Shawn C. Phillips here as I thought he brought quite a bit to the film. I didn't realize this guy was "famous" until after I watched the movie and checked out his credits. I also want to give the film credit for casting "real people" and what I mean by that is the fact that the cast features real looking people that you'd expect to find in a real world and not just those from a modeling school. Heck, even Danny Trejo shows up. Still, HAUNTED HIGH is pretty worthless and the only thing to really consider is if it's worse than SyFy's BIGFOOT.

I normally do not considered the rating given by IMDb visitor about the movie, however, on this particular movie, I should say that the rating was too much on the high side. The rating should be max 1.

I was tempted to watch this movie because of Charisma Carpenter was mentioned as on of the star. If you are talking about using somebody's name to sell your movie, this is a very good example. Charisma did appear, although in a total scene of less than 1 minutes. I don't even know why she accepted this part, it is really degrading.

When you see a ghost movie, you expect something that is scary, but on this one due to the bad story and strange script, you do not feel the fear. Instead it is a hollow feeling, like if you want a very unromantic love story.

One of the ghost action which I can not understand is how it is possible that you have a collapse building on one section of the school and the rest of the building seems okay and of course to follow the title, the ghost will have the incredible power of shaking the building like an earthquake. An of course the usual light that is always flickering when you are entering a room in a ghost story is there.

A movie is basically a collection of acts being put together by a director to make sense out of this collection. There is a recipe for each type of movie. But if you do a terrible mixed, then what you will get is a make up story with something supposed to be scary but end up being funny.....

I give 1 out of 10, because there is no zero or more for the effort of making something so bad to annoy other people.....

Haunted High is an unremarkable exercise in hack work that got 2 stars only because of the all too brief "zombie frog" sequence. M.C. Gainey as a released spirit of a evil cult leader comes across as a poor man's Stacey Keach spouting off pre death puns so bad that Freddy Kreuger wouldn't touch them. The CGI isn't as bad as say Piranhaconda but it isn't any better than an old episode of Goosebumps either and Goosebumps is scarier. The bare bones plot of teens and teachers locked in school with demonic forces is purely a Chinese menu type of affair. Take one tired cliché from collum A and 3 bad scenarios from collum B. As for kills the majority of them take place off screen followed by a gush of blood on the nearby wall. Shawn C. Phillips is the most believable person in the cast so that says something right there. Danny Trejo is the stereotyped Hispanic love sick janitor but his good guy roles aren't nearly as convincing as his bad as roles and this is nowhere as entertaining as Machete. Rent that instead. The bottom line is as long as there are masochists that stay home on Saturday nights to watch this crapola and as long as there are sponsors willing to jump on board SyFy is gonna keep churning out the cinematic equivalent to Montezuma's Revenge.If you must watch it do what I did and fast forward through about half.

Generally I hate SyFy movies with a passion. Haunted High is thankfully not one of their worst, the zombie frog sequence is fun if all too brief, Shawn C.Phillips and Lauren Pennington are likable and while Danny Trejo deserved much better he does what he can. On the other hand, a lot of the film was lame. The rest of the acting is bland, but there is no wonder when their material was as under-par as it was. I had a feeling that the characters would be stereotypes as they always are when it comes to SyFy, I wasn't necessarily put off by that. It was that few of them were memorable or had any spark to them. They were further disadvantaged by some embarrassingly stilted dialogue that never rings true and by a story that manages to be both predictable and dull with no chills or suspense and the attacks and ending were too contrived to be believable. The music is also repetitive, while Haunted High is also very cheap to look at with very choppy editing and while the effects have been worse before in SyFy movies they are substandard here at best. So in conclusion, a lame movie but at the same time it could've been much worse. 4/10 Bethany Cox

High school senior Jonathan Baron (as Quentin Smith) agrees to help a history teacher in the boiler room. They drop some mystical gold coins Mr. Baron inherited from his grandfather, which causes the old man's spirit to appear. Ghostly grandfather M.C. Gainey (as Lionel Danforth) causes earthquakes in the New England private school. Baron's girlfriend Lauren Pennington (as Whitney Douglas) starts seeing things. People get slaughtered - in very violent ways. Wizened janitor Danny Trejo (as Ortiz) joins the students in battling Mr. Gainey...

In featured roles, thin Marc Donato (as Colt) and thick Shawn Phillips (as Blake) overextend their years in high school. Sexy librarian Charisma Carpenter is seen briefly. The opening credit sequence is a highlight, but the accompanying song - a re-write of Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place to Go" - could stir the rock 'n' roll star's once protective lawyers into action. The special effects aren't too bad, for this sort of thing. However, the TV Movie earns a failing grade as director Jeffery Scott Lando and his crew can't turn the effects into an engaging story.

*** Haunted High (8/25/12) Jeffery Scott Lando ~ Jonathan Baron, Lauren Pennington, M.C. Gainey, Danny Trejo