The Trailer:
Director: Tom Elkins
Cast: Abigail Spencer, Chad Michael Murray, Emily Alyn Lind, & Katee Sackhoff
Synopsis: A family moves into a historic home in Georgia, only to be terrorized by it's ghostly inhabitants.
There is absolutely no relation between this movie and the first Haunting in Connecticut other than they are both based on episodes from Discovery Channel's series A Haunting. And let me say, the episode— which happens to be one of my favorite episodes of the series— is so much better than the movie and with a lot more horror. Also, the episode has a much more endearing story, whereas this movie is more sinister in nature and not in a good way. Adding to that, Ghosts of Georgia really just tried to cash on the relative success of the first film and failed miserably. The first one, as clichéd as it is, had atmosphere and a truly chilling performance by Kyle Gallner. This movie, on the other hand, is just silly and takes no time to build any kind of story or a fearful atmosphere. It's just jump scares, jump scares, jump scares over and over, which is only "scary" the first time. And due to the constant jump scares, we see too much ghost! Literally every five or ten minutes there is a jump scare with some ghostly figure manifesting itself. Seeing the ghost that many times renders it useless; it no longer has a scare element to it. And then the effects are shitty and something you'd expect of a TV movie (think the SyFy channel or the Chiller network). Every time one of the female characters (who all have the ability to see ghosts) sees a ghost, it is in a weird, blurred, vignetted filter which just looks dumb and is unnecessary. The story itself is okay, but strays far away from the actual story, which I guess is to make it more believable of the south (there are slave ghosts). But if they were going to go into that kind of dark historical southern territory, I wish they would've gone all in. If they were going to include slaves, then that should've been the horror of the movie: the atrocities that they had to endure, the struggles they went through. Instead we get a story that includes slaves but doesn't touch on any real slave struggles. I don't know, to me, it felt kind of halfhearted to bring in the slave element just to make the story more "southern". I wish the script writers would've just kept to the original story instead of taking such creative liberties that, in the end, brought that movie down.
The acting in the movie, however, is solid. Little Emily Alyn Lind, who played Heidi Wyrick, is a fantastic child actor who portrayed true terror and as a viewer I felt scared for her. Abigail Spencer as Lisa Wyrick, Heidi's mother, also did an amazing job as a mother trying to do right for her child, even though every choice she made wasn't always a good choice. Chad Michael Murray as Andy Wyrick, Heidi's father, is great. He showed real desire to protect his child, even though he didn't always understand what was going on with her. Katee Sackhoff, playing Joyce, Lisa's sister, is probably the only performance that comes off as a little forced and silly, but despite that she still did a good job. There is a particular scene that I liked Katee Sackhoff in, which is the scene that I have pictured above: she has threads coming from her mouth that are tacked to the ceiling and it just looks really cool.
In conclusion, this is not a good movie. It is boring and not suspenseful in the least. There is no real scare element and when they finally find out the truth about the land they're living on I didn't even care. I was so done with the movie by that point. And with all the silliness involved in this movie, I don't understand how it is rated R... I wouldn't watch it again.
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