User Reviews

Starting to watch HAUNTER I had very few preconceptions. In fact, I had next to no prior insight at all. Keywords like "horror," "thriller," "ghost story" were all I had to go on. And as I do love a good horror, thriller, ghost story, I went for it - as you probably would too, if you were me.

The premise is an undeniably intriguing one and events kick off in a promisingly creepy way. Teen goth chick Lisa (Abigail Breslin) is awakened by the voice of her young brother on a walkie-talkie. She is in a house seemingly cut off from the rest of the world by an impenetrable fog bank. Her day starts with a family breakfast – brother, mother and father - all syrupy pancakes and idle chatter. Then she does the laundry in the basement whilst her father works on fixing the car in the garage. She has lunch and then she plays the clarinet in her room along to a vinyl recording of "Peter And The Wolf." She has dinner and then the family settles down to watch an episode of"Murder She Wrote" on TV.

It soon becomes apparent that the family are stuck in a loop with every day starting the same way, every event playing out the same, every meal, every activity, and each word spoken. The only difference being that Lisa has come to realise it whilst the other three family members do not. Her efforts to explain and convince them amount to little as they can't understand what she's talking about. They are obliviously living the day for the first time whilst Lisa is living it over and over again. So she starts to tamper with the trajectory of events and stuff, as they say, happens.

That's a great set-up for a chiller and it certainly got my attention. Sadly, it didn't hold or reward it for long. What follows is a tweenie-friendly ghost story centred on Edgar (Stephen McHattie) a fruit-loop serial killer offing people for decades. He is now dead himself, but that doesn't stop him. The house was the place he lived all his life and obliterated the bodies of his victims in a sub-basement furnace. His spirit possesses the father of any family unit who moves into the house and induces him to kill his loved ones and himself. Edgar has control of the spirits of all his past victims and he keeps them trapped in the house as his playthings. Lisa and her family are in fact dead as of 1985.

In the present day, Olivia (Eleanor Zichy), first mistakenly thought to be a spiritual presence, is the daughter of the family who currently occupy the house. She is trying to connect with Lisa in an effort to help save her own family from the same fate. Her daddy is starting to get a touch of the Nicholson's. She's figured it all out, see – somehow or other.

Content-wise, it's bloodless, non-violent, with no scares, no shocks, no suspense and not even the most meagre attempted stab at logical structure or a dynamic, functioning narrative form. After a tremendously promising preamble that has a cool Twilight Zone vibe, the whole thing falls flatly into a slop of utter blandness and monotony like a sugar-free blancmange dropping down a drainpipe into a vat of flavourless jello.

It's a shame as the production values, set-design and cinematography are far from shabby, and the shift between the time frames represented on screen is authentically realised and represented. There is some good audio FX work also. A decent level of thought and attention to detail has been invested in the crucial peripheral elements and the stage is immaculately set-up for something dark, moody and malevolent.

The action lacks bite and impact and the narrative quickly devolves into a cookie-cutter drone-along for the bud-eared tweenie generation. This might possibly be a bit insulting to and underestimating of the sensibilities of the target audience. What causes filmmakers to believe young adults need patronising to the extent they are constantly fed a white-food diet of TWILIGHT-style junket? Is it too much of a stretch beyond the pale to imagine they could cope with something a bit more viscerally thrilling and punchy than that? In that event perhaps the rest of us could even get something meaningful out of it into the bargain. The Daniel Radcliffe version of THE WOMAN IN BLACK, although far from perfect, does illustrate to some extent how atmospheric hackle-raising chills and suitably gruesome implications can be generated in a film that need not be an adults only preserve.

Performances are borderline competent, but bemusedly frozen-faced and inexpressive - especially the adults. It's as if they have all been under the plastic surgeons knife and subsequently administered large industrial strength shots of Botox. What gives with this? The situation isn't helped much by Breslin wearing in sympathy the same wide-eyed look of a startled doe throughout, irrespective of the scene or activity she's involved in.

What is to some extent forgivable is a film that starts out bad and gets progressively better. Or starts out bad and continues that way. Or even starts out mundane and ends up mundane. What is unforgivable is a film that starts out well then discards that initial promise and grows quickly and progressively worse. Raising expectations to simply and casually ruin them is a cardinal sin. HAUNTER is guilty of that cinematic crime. As charged.

A pleasant surprise. I put off watching this movie because I felt the idea of a ghost being haunted by humans was already covered in "The Others." However, this one added a few additional twists which made an intriguing story which I definitely needed to see through to the end with no disappointments, including how the actors carried their roles.

There is no gore, if you don't mind seeing a few skeletal remains or the process of a body dying and crumbling. If you like complex stories more than visual gore, this is definitely a must see.

This line is added to satisfy IMDb's idea that a review must be long and boring to be submitted.

I suffered through the 2nd and 3rd act of this film cause I'm kind of a buff, and I wanted to see where it ended up. The acting was okay. Abigail Breslin has a way to go to be good, but she's getting her chops. The other actors were average.

The biggest problem with this film is it was supposed to be creepy, but never really achieves anything close to that. The story itself is so convoluted that about a third of the way through it was already boring me winding it's way to make a point showing the same plot development over and over like Ground Hog Day. This could almost be called "Ghostbuster meets Groundhog, the Other Story," since it was trying so hard to be the movie, The Others, with Nicole Kidman, but that film was far, far superior to this entry.

The whole narrative ends up some weirdly conceived (in a bad way) attempt to do something original with a ghost story. It wasn't a bad idea with the basic premise as discussed above (I didn't lay out the whole story obviously), so if you decide to take this one in. I would probably suggest skipping it for a better movie like The Others, The Six Sense, or even Ground Hog day if you want scarier for the first two, and funnier, if you pick the last if you haven't seen them.

I think a 3 is pretty generous for this flick. The cinematography isn't too bad or the editing. Good luck if you watch it, and see if you don't agree with me.

In 1985, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Lisa (Abigail Breslin) discovers that she is stuck in time, living the same day over and over with her parents Bruce (Peter Outerbridge) and Carol (Michelle Nolden) and her little brother Robbie (Peter DaCunha). Soon she learns that they are dead and trapped on the day that they were murdered but she finds that she can contact other people. Out of the blue, a stranger (Stephen McHattie) comes to her house telling that he is going to fix the telephone line but indeed to threaten her to stop the contacts. Lisa finds that she is contacting victims of the killer in different timelines including the future, and the killer's name is Oscar. Will be possible to Lisa to stop the evil Oscar?

"Haunter" is an intriguing ghost story with a promising idea of an evil spirit, but with a deceptive conclusion. The story is a combination of "The Others" with "Groundhog Day" and "The Twilight Zone", with good performance of Abigail Breslin. But the corny conclusion could be better. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): Not Available.

This is a Canadian film directed by Vincenzo Natali. HAUNTER is a supernatural chiller that provides a thrilling shiver or two. The ghost of a teenage girl, Lisa(Abigail Breslin),wakes up to realize that she is ...dead. Lisa is stuck in some kind of time warp that has her reliving the same day she and her family were murdered. Her parents and little brother go about a repetitive life not knowing they too are dead. Lisa will find personal items that belong to other people killed in the house. Things get real creepy, when Lisa goes through an "awakening" that has her meeting the evil spirit responsible for years of killing trying to keep possession of the house.

Not a lot of elaborate special effects; but I really like the sequences of the house sitting in the woods surrounded by thick fog. Be forewarned of a couple of scenes where you feel you've jumped out of your own skin. HAUNTER was written by Brian King and filmed in Toronto. Miss Breslin is excellent in this role. Maybe I just like the fact she is not a little girl anymore. Rounding out the cast: Peter Outerbridge, Michelle Nolden, Peter DaCunha, Eleanor Zichy and Stephen McHattie brings out the heebie jeebies.

I watch this movie not knowing what to expect. At first i found it a little bit weird, why is every day the same, and what is happening in the house. After awhile you see that the movie is told from a family who died, and only the girl and her brother know that they are dead. After a while the girl finds out about a horrible story that happened in her house. She has to help a living family who must undergo the same fate that killed her family. She tries to help them but a ghost of a murderer tries everything to stop her and you find out that he is a really twisted human being. I found this a very interesting movie, it is something new, and i like that it is told out of the eyes of a ghost and what the other side looks like.

Spoiler Alert. Watch first and enjoy if you don't want another's p;reception of the film.

The movie. Well, it has moments but is a little, no, quite a bit disjointed. The character flipping sometimes works but mostly doesn't. Why the same character (Carol I think.) keeps coming back as a ghost guide to Lisa in a way is confusing. The statement that Lisa must stay away from the living uttered by a spooky voice only confuses and does not explain anything pertinent to the movie. Is she dead? If so, who bother with anything awake or not? If dead and unaware as are her parents, no harm done. Only when one "wakes up" do bad things start happening. This is a major flaw.

The twist plot is set up in a ham-handed kind of way so that the surprise that worked well in a movie like "The Sixth Sense" misses here.

The time shifts and resets occur too often to really follow the suspense. Too many fathers or not enough. Why only one family to interact with when so many children were supposedly taken?

There are some creepy moments which are more or less typical horror movie fare. Amazing how "It was a dark and stormy night" scenarios still are the basis of thrillers and suspense movies. After all, there's nothing more frightening than a young girl crawling into a confined, dark place in search of some kind of evil of which she barely understands. But a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. So alone she braves the unknown. Cliché?

So, is she dead and awake or is she not dead and asleep or dreaming while dead or in a limbo that resembles Hell more than an afterlife. And the family is supposedly put there by an evil force that possesses the fathers? Then where are all the others who were victims of the same evil? I kept waiting to see them but they never appeared.

When I( see movies like this, I always hope they will achieve the level of "The Lovely Bones." But in comparison, TLB was leagues above this effort.

I made an account especially to comment on this movie!! And the ratings below are an absolute prove of how many of them are fake.

The acting is terrible, like literally really really terrible the girl is obviously taking the script point for point its like you are standing right beside her with the script telling here when to act shocked or show empathy or be sad..

The story is not scary, not in any way. Nor does it make sense for most of the movie.

This movie is fun when you are below the age of 10, apart from that it is fake and actually a bit insulting. Don't waste your time! I understand we all have different tastes and like different things, but this is absolutely a terrible movie and the reviews are mostly fake I can assure you.