This shorter vehicle comes out far better than Blue Kat Boneyard's/Jeff Stoll's previous Museo Taurino, with Mr ??? repeating his troubled role, only this time he is prey rather than hunter. As The Divorcee, he looks like a particularly worldweary individual, wearing a full beard to replace his stubble as Don Guillermo and with the formerly wild hair cut close. In this role he has been unlucky enough to head to smalltown America after a bitter divorce, but his streak of ill fortune has not ended. He has unintentionally purchased a house complete with ghosts.

Evidently preparing to commit suicide and join his ghost friends in an eternal orgy, he drunkenly sets up a camcorder, explains what he has discovered within the house, emphatically stating the monster within is a single unit, three evil ghosts acting as one entity inside his supposedly happy home. He then goes to the kitchen, selects a large buitcher knife after discarding another as too small, shuts the basement door behind him, guts himself, then emerges in a trance, evidently a spectral form who is indeed greeted by his ghostly companions.

There are striking similarities to The Turn Of the Screw in as much as one is not sure until the very end whether the ghosts are in the mind of the seer or for real. Likewise, the ghosts do not talk, though they walk about unseen by their host, whisper influencing things (and probably dirty suggestions), and observe, waiting for what they know will soon happen.

For an indy scene, there is one particularly frightening bit of camera work, equal to anything out there. Our divorcee, in flashback, thinks of how he might have felt the presence of the ghosts, then as he opens his basement door, is confronted by one of them. He screams, shuts the door, then reopens it again to see the figure gone. By this point, he has already accepted both their presence and his own pending doom.

The story of how the ghosts evolved is a kinky one. A brother and sister having sex with each other are joined by a bisexual swinger in college. When the parents of the brother/sister tag team are killed in a car crash, they inherit the house and move in, free to do all sorts of sick sexual things, presumedly for their own indy film business. Then one of them finds God at a church service and acting in true priestly fashion (sarcasm intended), kills her two lovers then herself. But as the poor divorcee puts it "They didn't stay dead."

Being a non budgeter, the sex scenes are spoken of and the ghosts remain sensual, but clothed. Dale Pierce should have just sold this plot to Jesus Franco or someone, who would have tittied it up and pissed it up a bit, to have screen action matching the descriptions given for the evil spirits as they were when walking the earth. Well, maybe it can be resold? In the meantime, for what it is, this is not bad.

Curiously, the ghosts are not raving beauties, though Gwendolyn has a certain vampirish charm to her. They look like normal people, i.e. the kinds you would find, perhaps, doing this murky shit beyond closed doors. That makes them all the more believable. They are not unattractive, any of them, but are not exactly Playboy bunnies. That is what adds to the believability of this movie.

Many indy films are garbage and especially short films, but for the budget and what it is, this one is worth a look. The company did a great deal, with very limited resources. On par with anything from say, Troma. That ghost behind the door scene (with an interesting blooper in the outtakes section) is masterful. The lighting is just right, probably by accident, but....

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review � by Harold Metzger