Every once in a while a horror movie comes along with an interesting new spin or a brand new premise. The idea is to create something new rather than a rehash of any of the top ten to twelve horror movie archetypes out there. "Crazy Eights" has a good idea, but it doesn't really go anywhere with it. Part of the problem is the glaring holes in the plot and the confusing script. The movie starts out like "Without A Paddle" as six friends meet at the funeral of a classmate and are drawn into a scavenger hunt they takes them into a remake of "House On Haunted Hill." After a variety of strange encounters in their lives, the six are drawn to a barn where they left a time capsule as kids and find a skeleton in the trunk, which may or may not be linked to their pasts. They struggle too briefly with doing the right thing and way too quickly try to shrug it off if but to get very quickly lost on the local dirt roads and end up at an old deserted hospital in the ghost town of Entonsburg within an unidentified Southern state. This is where things start getting confusing. Instead of making efforts to get on their way, they explore the hospital and start getting picked off by an unseen killer in a dress. Thankfully, the gore is done off-camera with the disturbing images revealed only in brief flickering images. It's difficult to feel sympathetic to the characters unless you're a fan of the actors. The cast includes George Newbern, Traci Lords, Gabrielle Anwar and a number of actors with whom I'm unfamiliar. The movie never at any moment makes an effort to clear up or resolve any questions, instead pushing forward and killing off its cast like, as Jeff Goldblum once put it, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride coming to life and killing the tourists. In fact, the movie can't choose if it's a haunted house movie or a slasher/gore movie. Somewhere in this detritus of scenes and images, the movie establishes the six friends once lived in the old hospital with their deceased friend and one other girl ("The Crazy Eight") where they were victims of psychological experiments, but they escaped after hiding the young girl and promising to return. (Remind you of "I Know What You Did Last Summer?") This suggests their dead friend is the one getting revenge for forgetting about her in the trunk all those years ago, but at no point does anyone realize, "Hey, this the old hospital where we were abandoned by our parents to be terrorized by those evil doctors?" How could they possibly block something like that out, and why does the girl's ghost look adult and zombified? Why do they stay in the building when all they were doing was trying to get directions? Why does the ghost kill them at all when she could just scare the crap out of them over and over and over? Like I said, the movie can't decide what it is. It's a promising premise that gets convoluted and confusing without being scary or even making sense, and in my world, that's just a crying waste of what could have been a decent haunted house movie.

A movie which is hectically manipulative with cinematography as indicated with the use of unsettling angles. There is a feeling of not being allowed to go (entrapment). It's about the remaining energy which has been trapped for so many years must be released and the grudge of the issue must come out in order for the problem to be solved. This is also a movie which revolves around history repeating itself and it must be faced; the horror has to be uncovered and the secrets of the past must be revealed. And this movie has an incredibly effective sound track with the use of manipulated synths and electronic instruments which give a haunting sensation! Hectically manipulative!

Six people come together after the death of a childhood friend and begin to unravel the secret behind a past they can't remember while trapped in some abandoned hospital kind of place, and thus begins the very many problems with Crazy Eights.The film is basically one very big collection of plot holes, beyond what I tried to sum up never really made sense, because for someone like me who has a long attention span, I can clearly say that barely anything is explained, for example, what was the purpose of the experiments? why was the dead girl so vengeful if she died accidentally? And how can a group childhood friends remember each other but they don't remember a thing about their childhood? I don't know if the director tried to make one of those films that's suppose to stay with you for a long time after you've watched it, wondering about the same things I just pointed out, well he did, only after I watched it, I didn't really like it.Another problem is the score, while watching the film I noticed that the score practically played throughout the film, I can probably account for less than three seconds for when I didn't hear it, and it was more annoying than anything else, for the majority of the film it just played, it didn't help set the tone or create a certain mood or help the film build any kind tension, it just played and muffled a lot of the dialog.The acting was so so, but whatever kind of film the filmmakers tried to make obviously doesn't work, want my advice? Broaden out the storyline leaving fewer plot holes and make less use of the score and more use of sound and lighting effects to create a lot of atmosphere, I am sure it'll work better.

Another one of the After Dark, Horrorfest movies, that is kind of a Big Chill horror movie with a very angry ghost. The death of a childhood friend of six others, bring them all together at the funeral. The deceased has outlined something he wants his friends to do, and that's follow a map that leads them to a spooky building, that they get trapped inside with a little girl ghost that takes them out one by one. Not a lot of action in the first half of the movie, mostly dialogue between the six which is pretty interesting, but might not sit well with a lot of horror fans. After the ghost comes into the story, it becomes a survival against all odds, and with a very strong cast, they pull it off pretty well. I kind of liked the movie myself, but I can see why other genre fans may not be too fond of it.