Death of a Ghost Hunter starts on October 17th 2002 as paranormal investigator Carter Simms (Patti Tindall) arrives in the small town of Queens Creek in Arizona where she is being paid $5,000 to conduct an investigation into the notorious Masterson House where an entire family were brutally murdered twenty years ago. Rumours of ghostly goings-on have persisted ever since & Carter has been brought in to try & discover the truth along with video guy Colin Green (Mike Marsh) & writer Yvette Sandoval (Davina Joy). Over the course of three nights they experience supernatural activity which is linked to the homes violent past, Carter believes she has 'tangible evidence' that there is life after death...
Edited, photographed, produced, written & directed by Sean Tretta I thought this ghost film was pretty terrible on all fronts. The film revolves around the modern MTV style trend of Ghost Hunting, you know the sort of show's like Real Scary Stories (2000), Ghost Hunters (2004) & the UK equivalent Ghost Hunting with 'add celebrity name here' in which various 'experts', celebrities & ordinary members of the public are filmed in supposedly haunted locations on blurry night vision camera equipment & overact terribly. Imagine one of those largely awful show's drawn out to almost two hours in length & you still can't imagine how bad Death of a Ghost Hunter is. The film also plays like a cheap TV reenactment of the likes of The Entity (1981), Poltergeist (1982) & The Haunting (1999) in which scientific means are used to try & prove life after death but since it's set in a bland two storey middle class town house there's zero atmosphere. The back-story is also fairly routine stuff with some terrible event happening in the homes past & that provides the twist when it gets reenacted during the present which isn't much of a twist since that's what always happens, isn't it? The only other twist is given away in the films title. The character's are poor, the dialogue is dull & at almost two hours the pace is gruelling, I really wanted to bail out on several occasions but just about managed to stick with it.
Horror films & haunted house horror films in particularly need a certain atmosphere & feel to be effective & that's one of my biggest problems with Death of a Ghost Hunter since it takes place in a very bland house. No cobwebs, no dusty old attics, no creaking staircases & no cats jumping out at random moments. The style of the film borrows heavily from The Blair Witch Project (1999) with it's use of hand-held point-of-view camcorders, it's a style that I personally dislike & The Blair Witch Project is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. I just think it's a really ugly & annoying style of film-making. Apart from some blood splatter on a family photo there's no gore, or at least I don't remember any. The film lacks any scares, looks cheap & has a lot of boring exposition & discussion that I found tedious & dull in the extreme. Despite all the films claims that Carter Simm was real & the events portrayed were real Death of a Ghost Hunter is in fact totally fictitious & made-up.
Probably shot on a budget that wouldn't cover a round of drinks at my local pub Death of a Ghost Hunter really does look like it was shot by a bunch of friends in their middle class house on camcorders for fun & then decided to release it. Gee, thanks. The acting is weak from the whole five people in it.
Death of a Ghost Hunter is an awful cross between one of those reality ghost hunting TV show's, The Blair Witch Project & The Haunting. Sounds terrible, right? Well, it is terrible.
Edited, photographed, produced, written & directed by Sean Tretta I thought this ghost film was pretty terrible on all fronts. The film revolves around the modern MTV style trend of Ghost Hunting, you know the sort of show's like Real Scary Stories (2000), Ghost Hunters (2004) & the UK equivalent Ghost Hunting with 'add celebrity name here' in which various 'experts', celebrities & ordinary members of the public are filmed in supposedly haunted locations on blurry night vision camera equipment & overact terribly. Imagine one of those largely awful show's drawn out to almost two hours in length & you still can't imagine how bad Death of a Ghost Hunter is. The film also plays like a cheap TV reenactment of the likes of The Entity (1981), Poltergeist (1982) & The Haunting (1999) in which scientific means are used to try & prove life after death but since it's set in a bland two storey middle class town house there's zero atmosphere. The back-story is also fairly routine stuff with some terrible event happening in the homes past & that provides the twist when it gets reenacted during the present which isn't much of a twist since that's what always happens, isn't it? The only other twist is given away in the films title. The character's are poor, the dialogue is dull & at almost two hours the pace is gruelling, I really wanted to bail out on several occasions but just about managed to stick with it.
Horror films & haunted house horror films in particularly need a certain atmosphere & feel to be effective & that's one of my biggest problems with Death of a Ghost Hunter since it takes place in a very bland house. No cobwebs, no dusty old attics, no creaking staircases & no cats jumping out at random moments. The style of the film borrows heavily from The Blair Witch Project (1999) with it's use of hand-held point-of-view camcorders, it's a style that I personally dislike & The Blair Witch Project is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. I just think it's a really ugly & annoying style of film-making. Apart from some blood splatter on a family photo there's no gore, or at least I don't remember any. The film lacks any scares, looks cheap & has a lot of boring exposition & discussion that I found tedious & dull in the extreme. Despite all the films claims that Carter Simm was real & the events portrayed were real Death of a Ghost Hunter is in fact totally fictitious & made-up.
Probably shot on a budget that wouldn't cover a round of drinks at my local pub Death of a Ghost Hunter really does look like it was shot by a bunch of friends in their middle class house on camcorders for fun & then decided to release it. Gee, thanks. The acting is weak from the whole five people in it.
Death of a Ghost Hunter is an awful cross between one of those reality ghost hunting TV show's, The Blair Witch Project & The Haunting. Sounds terrible, right? Well, it is terrible.
