Here's a run-of-the-mill haunted house flick which isn't actually bad, just boring. The film runs for over a hundred minutes see, and only thirty minutes of that time is made up of action. The rest of the film is padded with unnecessary surreal dream sequences (usually showing the lead character naked or in bed, go figure), lots of talk about nothing in particular and people going about their daily lives. Now, with a bit of snappy editing and some more suspense, this could have been a great movie.As it is, we're left with a slow-paced film which has some good scares occurring at irregular intervals. A string of gore murders (following scenes which seem to take an age to actually get to the action) is included for the genre fan to enjoy, with various victims getting scythes in faces, getting impaled through the eyes with railings and, in a fantastic shock scene, dragged into the still waters of a lake by rotting hands which rise up out of nowhere. The ghosts don't really haunt their mansion as such, instead appearing in dreams or to play music or pop up and smash a window occasionally.The film is heavy on atmosphere, complemented by some effectively spooky music and an interesting setting in the octagonal mansion. The usual technical errors you will find in a low budget film are present (here it's mainly continuity errors) but there's nothing majorly wrong with it. The cast is primarily made up of unknowns, although genre veteran John Carradine makes a welcome appearance as an old man who spends half of his scenes lingering in a wheelchair and the other half lingering in his deathbed! Robin Groves is okay as the female lead, more down-to-earth and realistic than most, but she does display an annoying tendency to scream too much in the final act. Sadly the male leads (on the side of good) are generally wooden and it's left to Bill Rowley and David Tabor to ham it up enjoyably as weird rednecks.It's a shame that this movie is pretty hard to sit through, because it closes with a bang-in-your-face ending which really does make you sit up in your seat. The genuinely horrific finale is a flashback to when the former inhabitants of the mansion (prostitutes) are murdered by a trio of angry townsfolk. This is powerful stuff as we watch the men go from room to room, slaughtering innocent (of crime, that is) folk in their wake. The best scene in the movie, but it's a shame that there's so much twaddle to sit through before you get to it. You could do worse, though, I suppose.

The Nesting is an open-ended supernatural thriller featuring a convincingly neurotic writer with a bad case of agoraphobia (among other things) who decides to rent a house she finds out in the country that looks suspiciously like the one featured on one of her book covers. At times the film is a reasonably intelligent thriller but it has a tendency to err on the side of goofiness. Many of the characters, despite being likable, are incredibly over the top (the Colonel, handyman Frank, etc) and quite often characters are brought into a scene solely to die because there aren't enough victims on-hand.The film's ambiguity is largely owed to the fact that the ghost scenes only seem tooccur when the writer is nearby and the others seem to die right after the encounter. That and a later reference would almost suggest that the thing could have been in her head although the attacks look like they're being carried out by an invisible, supernatural assailant.The writer's character is relatively dull, as are her two apparent romantic interests. Other characters are humorously colorful and bring a lot more to the production but the protagonist really seems to exist to do little other than unconvincingly act scared by various phenomena (oddly not done as well as the agoraphobia, but clever camera-work helped with that) and to unravel a mystery that never quite gets compelling.

Lauren Cochran (Robin Groves) is an agoraphobic novelist who leaves the hustle of the bustle of the city to rent an isolated house in the country, where she hopes to concentrate on her next book. Fat chance, for soon after arriving, the writer suffers a series of terrifying visions that lead her to suspect that the place is haunted. She's correct, of course: her new abode, a whorehouse during the war, was the site of a terrible, bloody massacre, and now the spooks want revenge!For a film about a haunted brothel, by a film-maker best known for X-rated 'roughie' porn, The Nesting is surprisingly less exploitative than one might expect, taking a comparatively reserved approach that concentrates more on delivering atmosphere and scares than simple shock value.To director Armand Weston's credit, the result isn't all that bad, with an intriguing basic plot, reasonable central performances, and one or two well constructed death scenes that benefit from the sparse but effective use of gore (the demise of a nasty hick at the hands of a sickle wielding Lauren is especially fun); but although the finished product ain't a total disaster, it's not a complete success either, suffering from a poorly developed script in desperate need of judicious pruning (the film is way overlong at 102 minutes!), a couple of irritating characters (most notably, Lauren's wise-cracking boyfriend Mark), some blatant silliness that should have been fixed before filming commenced (how the hell does Lauren's self-help tape know the layout of her apartment?), and a daft ending that just doesn't know when to quit.It's a shame, because one can't help but feel that with such a salacious premise, the whole affair is something of a wasted opportunity: if Weston had stayed true to himself by allowing his film to be even half as depraved as his X-rated output, The Nesting would have been a far more satisfying film—a sleaze fan's idea of heaven instead of a fairly entertaining, but ultimately forgettable ghost story.5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.

A rather bland horror film that is as bad as it sounds, it actually surprisingly starts off quite well, with some effective scenes, but in the end it is not all so glamorous. The characters and acting are both poor, the special effects are rather icky, and in the latter half of the film there a number of sequences that seem to drag on and on pointlessly. In particular, the final twenty or so minutes leave a quite a sour taste in the mouth, however there is one reason why the film may be interesting to view, that being the choices of music, which, although not always appropriate, are still curious and intriguing.