The Haunting Of Rebecca Verlaine
Released 2008
So okay if you don’t like cheaply made, ultra low budget horror gore fests, don’t watch this. I feel this needs to be said as so many people I know are completely funny with low budget films. Like, you find this super awesome cheap B-movie and you tell them about it and they bitch and moan about how “my god it was so unrealistic, did you see those sets, waaa waaa waa”, ignoring the awesome story line of whatever it is that makes it awesome. I find the same thing with gore, some people just freak out about over-the-top, crazy gore.
So that being said the Haunting of Rebecca Verlaine obviously has this in spades. And some of the gore gets pretty nasty. In fact the most brutal of it all takes place during the opening sequence.
Okay, so basic premise: Rebecca Verlaine is haunted. Okay good enough? No? okay more then. Basically a hippie musician lives in this commune/love shack/farm whatever it is with a bunch of other like-minded people. One night they are all murdered in their sleep and no one has any clues as to who has done it. The only survivor is a young girl who represses all the memories and has no idea this has even happened.
They decide the only thing to do is not try to get her to remember and let her live a normal life. Jump forward about 10 years or so. The girl is in university studying psychology and she starts getting crazy hallucinations: a blood soaked man that is shocked she doesn’t recognize him.
So of course she approaches her “parents” (actually her aunt and uncle) who tell her the truth and her boyfriend/husband/whatever also knows about it. So they all tell her it is just her memories returning and of course it gets more and more real. Ewwweeeeoooo spooky right? And so she returns to the scene of the crime to try and solve this mystery, for which the case has been closed for years with no leads.
Of course this is where things start getting really fucking weird and awesome, but if tell you anymore I’ll ruin the whole damn thing for you and I really don’t want to do that. But lets just say it is pretty awesome. Part psychological thriller, part horror, part murder mystery it really does have some really great plot twists and interesting ideas.
And yes the camera work is shoddy, the acting at times horribly over the top and sometimes not so good. Things are cheap and the props aren’t always amazing, but the scripting makes up for it and there really aren’t any moments where you cringe and go ouch that is bad.
It’s really just a good, low budget, B-movie, with enough intrigue and surprises to get you into it. At first I thought the ending was going to be really obvious, and in a way I suppose it is, but it threw me none the less, I had expected a totally different set of events to occur and for there to be a much more typical lame, psycho drama type ending. Yeah, don’t expect that.
