This independent horror effort is so obscure that at time of writing I'm now only the 26th person on IMDB to have even seen it six years later!.It tells the story of a town with a grave secret. A tragedy took place and many high ranking folks within the community covered it up, but it doesn't want to stay buried!Sound familiar? That's because it's been done before, many many times. Thankfully though it's not exactly done well, it's not entirely without merit.It plods along swaying from side to side like a drunkard, it has ropey cinematography and is anything but original yet just about manages to keep its head above the water.The script is fairly decent, if the film kept focus and had better structure that alone might have led it to a far higher rating.Now apparently the budget was 175,000 dollars! I thought as I was watching it they were doing a good job to disguise the lack of funds but upon finding that out it raises all kinds of questions. Maybe production had really good catering?The Legend Of Black Annie isn't a good film by any means, but it isn't as bad as the IMDB rating would suggest.The Good:Script is better than you'd imagineSFX are quite decent in placesThe Bad:Some awful light effectsPlot trails offSomewhat unoriginalThings I Learnt From This Movie:White nighties are immune to blood stainsThe writer is familiar with Bloody Mary

THE LEGEND OF BLACK ANNIE is an independent blaxploitation horror in which a young black girl is accidentally killed only for her spirit to return to the world of the living, seeking revenge. This is cheesy beyond belief, lacking in basic production values, and often laughable when it tries to be serious. It's badly overacted throughout and the would-be scare sequences are lamentable and lacking. It's a bit of a joke all round, really.

Black Annie is, well, a black girl called Annie. We see her at the beginning in her pre-demonic state, being chased by three boys until she falls (with hilarious scream) off a cliff. I don't think that's a spoiler. Cut to thirteen (or eighteen? I wasn't paying enough attention) years later, and the boys are all grown up. One of them bizarrely seems to have styled his performance on Stevie Wonder. There's a lecture on 'urban legends' being delivered at the local high school,just like in Candyman and Urban Legend (is urban legend a common part of the syllabus in the US?).The performances, especially by the black actors, are absolutely hilarious. And I guess that 'Black Annie' herself is quite well done, creepiness-wise. The result of all of this is quite obviously a masterpiece. My one-star rating might seem a bit harsh, but I desperately want the creators of the film to persevere in their efforts and continue to develop as artists. My fear was that a ten-star rating, though thoroughly deserved, may have encouraged them to rest on their laurels, thus cruelly depriving the world of their sure-to-be-amazing future work.