This movie is what you get when you try to stretch a paragraphs' worth of plot and about two sentences' worth of characterization into a hour-and-a-half story. This ghostly tale is equal parts dumb and boring and the few cheap scares it musters up can't compete with a plethora of astoundingly contrived scenes and a near total lack of recognizable human behavior.
6 months after her twin sister committed suicide, Megan (Elisabeth Harnois) and her 4 friends head out to a big house in the Louisiana swamps to celebrate the Summer Solstice before heading off to college in the fall. While she's there, Megan is tormented by frightening visions that revolve around a teddy bear key chain her sister always carried around. What looks like the girl from the well in The Ring movies also shows up a couple of times. After boinking her dead sister's ex-boyfriend and making goo goo eyes at a handsome local who knows a little cajun voodoo, Megan finally discovers the reason she's being haunted and how it's connected to a creepy redneck who lives across the lake.
From teenagers putting on suits and ties to hold a dinner party to a huge house in the swamp that's perfectly maintained without a caretaker, from a plot twist that makes you want to throw something at the screen to one of Megan's friends looking like a preppie who escaped from a 1980s sex comedy (including wearing a polo shirt with an upturned collar), there's nothing about this film that makes sense or resembles anything like reality. These filmmakers took a very old and very clichéd ghost story that everyone's heard before and just started stapling stupid stuff onto it.
There are 7 characters in the story, yet they don't even have one personality among them. The film throws a few dream sequences at the audience but never defines exactly when they begin. So when the dream sequences end, you're not sure what actually happened and what was the dream. There's a series of flashbacks to the night Megan's sister killed herself, but there's no connection between what's going on in the story and when we see the flashbacks. It's not like something happens that makes Megan or someone else remember that night. The flashbacks are just inserted into the film, like little bathroom breaks for the viewer. You certainly can take a whiz anytime a flashback happens, because none of them contribute anything to the story.
If its cast of attractive young people had at least gotten naked a few times, Solstice might have been almost tolerable. If R. Lee Ermey had gone the full monty, it might have become horrifically irresistible. As it is, Solstice is just another PG-13 horror flick where the only horrifying thing about it is that I paid money to watch this piece of crap.
6 months after her twin sister committed suicide, Megan (Elisabeth Harnois) and her 4 friends head out to a big house in the Louisiana swamps to celebrate the Summer Solstice before heading off to college in the fall. While she's there, Megan is tormented by frightening visions that revolve around a teddy bear key chain her sister always carried around. What looks like the girl from the well in The Ring movies also shows up a couple of times. After boinking her dead sister's ex-boyfriend and making goo goo eyes at a handsome local who knows a little cajun voodoo, Megan finally discovers the reason she's being haunted and how it's connected to a creepy redneck who lives across the lake.
From teenagers putting on suits and ties to hold a dinner party to a huge house in the swamp that's perfectly maintained without a caretaker, from a plot twist that makes you want to throw something at the screen to one of Megan's friends looking like a preppie who escaped from a 1980s sex comedy (including wearing a polo shirt with an upturned collar), there's nothing about this film that makes sense or resembles anything like reality. These filmmakers took a very old and very clichéd ghost story that everyone's heard before and just started stapling stupid stuff onto it.
There are 7 characters in the story, yet they don't even have one personality among them. The film throws a few dream sequences at the audience but never defines exactly when they begin. So when the dream sequences end, you're not sure what actually happened and what was the dream. There's a series of flashbacks to the night Megan's sister killed herself, but there's no connection between what's going on in the story and when we see the flashbacks. It's not like something happens that makes Megan or someone else remember that night. The flashbacks are just inserted into the film, like little bathroom breaks for the viewer. You certainly can take a whiz anytime a flashback happens, because none of them contribute anything to the story.
If its cast of attractive young people had at least gotten naked a few times, Solstice might have been almost tolerable. If R. Lee Ermey had gone the full monty, it might have become horrifically irresistible. As it is, Solstice is just another PG-13 horror flick where the only horrifying thing about it is that I paid money to watch this piece of crap.