A priest, trying to regain his standing in the church after "falling" and sleeping with a woman, teams with a group of ESP experts to investigate a haunted house. It doesn't help that one of the experts is a beautiful young woman.
Similar titles
Reviews
This straight-to-video flick from Fred Olen Ray has not a single original bone in it's body. It starts out by stealing the premise of "The Legend of Hell House", dips into "The Exorcist" and then settles into a rip-off of "The Evil Dead". Robert Quarry headlines as a scientist leading an expedition to investigate a haunted house, bringing along psychic Brinke Stevens and a couple of other folks. This isn't exactly poorly done, but the film's budget just doesn't help it. The haunted house is just your average suburban home, and most of the film is just shot in broad daylight. While all this is going on, we meet priest Erik Estrada (yes, really) who is haunted by visions of, among other things, stark naked nun Michelle Bauer and scolding, not naked nun Carol Lynley. Eventually we learn how these two threads fit together, and the house is overrun by possessed people trying to kill other people. This should be awful, but somehow it's not. Maybe it's that the cast is not terrible, maybe it's that Ray borrows so many elements from good movies that some of them just work. It's by no means a good film, but it's no complete waste of time.
I have enjoyed similar B movies like Evil Toons, because they are just silly fun, with a little T and A, and cheesy, but cool fx to laugh at. Spirits takes itself seriously for the most part, and it just doesn't have the script to pull it off. And what I always have to nail a film like this on is the lack of nudity, only one brief breast shot from what I remember.The story is just a mish mash of better films, and the gore and makeup effects don't come in until towards the end, and they are just average at best. By the time they came I already lost interest. Sorry to say it doesn't deliver the goodies, so I'd skip it, unless you collect everything like myself, and are a scream queen completist.
Please do not waste your time watching this horribly scripted and acted movie. Let me tell you why...A few friends and I were looking for a spooky movie at the video store, unfortunatly it was around Halloween and all the good movies were gone. So we settled for this, the box didn't look half bad, little did we know.Okay, first Erik Estrada as a Priest? Then came the really corny music. The acting was terrible along with the visual effects, we were laughing so hard. Then we were totally appalled by the sex scences. A nun and a priest? Even if it was only a dream it was sooooo wrong. It only got worse. The "evil" makeup was so bad it could not be taken seriously. Finally we just gave up. Don't waste your time or money on this cheap exorcist knock-off.
This movie was somewhat entertaining. There's more bits and pieces of many different plot ideas instead of one basic plot. I was a little offended that there was so much female nudity in this movie. I think it was sexist, and made mainly for men, which isn't right. The worst thing about this movie was the poor acting. The characters barely showed any emotion, and when they did, it was brief. Even though the movie was mildly entertaining, it never got you really interested. This movie deserves a 2 on a scale of 1-10.