The Haunting of #24: Neither Scary or Worth Your Time

I must confess I'm a sucker for haunted house movies. The sound of creaking doors, glimpses of mysterious shadows skulking through the hallways. If done well, these films can make the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention.

Then we have THE HAUNTING OF #24, which is about as scary as watching a commercial about oatmeal (although eating undercooked oatmeal is a bit of a gastric nightmare in itself). That being said, I really did expect this British made chiller to deliver the goods and instead waited patiently for either a decent horrifying scene to occur or for the whole boring mess to come to a speedy ending . The plot concerns a man named John Hare who moves into a rooming house where the landlord assures him he will eventually get to know all the residents. The only tenant he does meet is an elderly woman who after asking him if he has a TV yells at him to "Get rid of it". From there on out John sees strange people in his television, a tombstone in the garden that has " Lie Still" written on it and an unseen person who tries to break into his room at night. When his ex-girlfriend Veronica visits him, the TV makes her it's prisoner, although the reason for this is never fully explained because the people inside of the TV are supposed to be dead. Like much of the movie, THE HAUNTING OF#24 sets up several interesting premises and then never fully explores any of them. They seem to exist simply to move the plot along. When John tells Veronica," I 've not been sleeping," I had no idea why because there were at least three times during this film where I began to nod off having to then rewind the DVD back to the point of my near fits of narcolepsy. The one scene that screams "cliche" is when the unseen person does break into his room. John stabs the intruder and it turns out to be his landlord. This was hardly a big surprise to me because I saw this coming from at least a mile away. And so will anyone else who watches this dud. Yes, the film is that predictable. In the end John, who has been driven mad by the evil entity in the house, commits suicide and the new tenant is talking to the landlord who had been killed earlier in the movie. And in one last attempt to throw, or at least try to throw, one last shiver into the audiences spine, we see the new tenant looking at John and Veronica who are now occupants of his television set. MTI Home Video has promoted this movie as "A New Urban Ghost Story". Sorry guys, this is a time waster that has no scares and is chock full of cliches. Even with it's brief 80 minute running time, the film still manages to wear out it's welcome. I 'm afraid it's back to the drawing board for writer/ director Sean Hogan who seemingly aimed high, yet missed the mark completely. Despite Hogan's best efforts, ROOM 1408 this ain't.