Timid, used student Danielle moves into a creepy place following the disintegration of her relationship and finds herself on the receiving end of an American director's vision of what a Japanese horror film would be like filmed in not-Japan land.This is more difficult than I thought. My name is Jay Rayner. I am an overweight, but highly groomed food critic who has taken some time of reviewing Celeriac puree and...that...in order to review a film, but it's hard than it looks! Honestly, if someone had presented me with a slimy panacotta I would go straight for the throat, but this film instead has very many merits in it's first half, as it goes for a Japanese style creep out what with the subtle scares and what not, but then goes a bit astray as the 'haunting' part goes out the window and a whole 'possesion' bit comes into play.I'm Jay Rayner. I have a beard that makes my face look like the world's worst fanny. Good day.

TC starts with a quote by Houdini: "Over the years, I have exposed numerous spiritualists and clairvoyants as charlatans… but the mesmerizing powers of Mordecai Zymytryk still to this day baffle and haunt me… "Some people are easily baffled and haunted, aren't they? Evidently, Houdini had been royally played by a top-notch charlatan, and perhaps by "numerous" he meant "two and a half", and perhaps by "mesmerizing" he meant "sexy and irresistible". (Houdini: a closet gay?). Houdini may have been a master escape-artist, but he was certainly no intellectual, as is evident from this miserable statement. Certainly if he could see this movie now, he'd have second thoughts about Mordecai, and he might cringe more than a bit for being the provider of this quote – not to mention being associated with this cheap B-movie.Considering how the script attempts to build up Zymytryk as an omnipresent magic god of sorts, it was rather surprising and highly puzzling to have this supposedly brilliant death-defying powerful witch-master turn out to be such an utter failure. Mr. Z pretty much gets everything wrong in the highly moronic "grand finale"; he messes up his own plan, allowing a ghost of a dumb child-murderer to outwit him. I guess there is only so much power you can have, even with three Ys and one Z in your name.One way of starting an awful movie is certainly shoving a useless dumb quote in the viewer's (hopefully tiny) brain, followed by cheap titillation. By this I mean the early scene in which the blond masturbates in a bathtub; cheap because we don't get to see her boobs, which is fairly annoying. I've always maintained that if your script sucks, the least you can do is undress your actresses. (Unless they happen to be Vanessa Redgrave or Ellen Degeneres, in which case you pay them to keep their clothes on.)One way of continuing a movie as bad as this is to make sure that the blood looks like Heinz ketchup and that there is practically no tension in any of the scenes. The fact that a perky blond is trying hard - but failing - in being menacing makes things worse. That ensures that the overall crapiness is maintained at a consistently high level.One way of concluding a bad movie is to turn the kid (who's an awful actor) into Damien. Certainly a successful ending – if crap is what you aimed for all along. And from what I've seen during these laughable 90 minutes, that is exactly what the film-makers wanted. They set out to make garbage and they ended up with garbage: mission accomplished, so everyone can go home and pour their Heinz ketchup on their cold low-budget pizzas.TC's obvious B-movie roots ensure that its very fake-looking ketchupy blood holds as much eerie power as a farm chicken hatching eggs. Like most modern B-movie horror films, TC is an abysmal failure. A weak soundtrack, mediocre camera-work, and average/sub-par actors make this an experience worthy of immediate deletion from the mind. You don't need to have Alzheimers to completely obliterate the memory of these 90 minutes just an hour after its viewing.The blonde's sister is fairly cute. That's about it.

This film was almost good. It had a really cool concept about being possessed by a spirit and becoming them. It was also strange for it was a girl being possessed by a male spirit. But the film is based around building this torture chair and learning something from the past from the house that the main character is staying in. Here is the problem though, parts of the film just made no sense. Something would come up and you would wonder why it even happened. Also the film had scenes for the jumping scare factor, but seemed to ruin it. A girl sees a blanket, yes we all know there is something under the blanket because we saw earlier in the film, something was put there. So no, it was not scary on parts that worked out like that. I do respect the story of the film though, it was really a good idea. It just wasn't portrayed right.

At the 30 minute point of The Chair, I was truly getting enjoyably creeped out. It was relatively standard "strange phenomena in creepy old house" fare, but it was done with just the right combination of discomforting lighting and sound to get under my skin. The lead actress was extremely appealing too, both easy on the eyes and approaching her character from a refreshingly intelligent standpoint. The quote on the case that led me to rent it said something along the lines of "achieves the same atmosphere as the Changeling or Amityville"... and for those first 30 minutes or so, it really did. There's one scene with a chair in a hallway that is frankly terrifying.But then a possession-style plot kicked in which, while still fairly entertaining, was nowhere near as powerful as the opening. The final half of the movie fell into a more mundane indie movie style, lost almost all of its creepiness, and sadly got a little unbelievable too. If the director had had the restraint to follow the tone of the first half through to the end it could have been a masterpiece in the haunted house genre. As it stands it's just another indie - far above average at first, then just average after that...