Haunt is frustratingly middle-of-the road. The story is decent, it's competently made, and it has a little style... but there's just nothing here to get excited about at all. There's nothing too good, but also nothing bad enough that you're either angry or entertained. Haunt is just there, hitting all the beats you expect it to and moving along at a fast enough pace to kill the time, but never doing anything too engaging. It's so average it's actually kind of impressive.
The Deal? There's this house... many people assume it's cursed, because the last family that lived there (and worked there - mom & dad had a pediatrician/dentist thing going on) had three children die under mysterious circumstances. And when dad dies during in the opening scene after talking into an old school radio-wave scanner (spirit box for all you Ghost Adventures nerds), mom decides it's time to high-tail it.
Enter the Asher family. Despite the house's reputation, the Ashers (Mom, Dad, college aged daughter, little girl, and angsty son Evan) like what they see and decide to move in. They find some creepy stuff in the house (weird paintings, hidden rooms), but nothing too bad happens until Sam enters the picture. Sam is a neighbor that Evan stumbles across while out on an evening walk. As teenagers that are new in town often do, Evan falls for her, and they get a cute relationship going. Adding a little drama (and a little extra incentive to crash at Evan's) is the fact that Sam lives with her drunk, abusive father. Anyways, Sam is curious about the old cursed house, finds the old spirit box, and the two try to communicate with the dead. Bad idea! Once the spirit has been engaged, it starts to get more and more bold until the Asher's are under a full scale paranormal assault.
Although that's not entirely true... it's really just Evan and Sam that have to deal with it. Little sister has a couple of brief moments with the ghost (talking to it like an imaginary friend, as the little ones are wont to do), but other than that no one really believes that anything out of the ordinary is going on. And once the S. hits the F. the rest of the family has already left on a conveniently timed vacation. So the film takes the simpler route of just having the two teens face the haunt. I guess it makes things less complicated and leaves less room for error, but it's just not all that exciting.
And Evan and Sam are serviceable as characters - but again, they are just very stock. They are both (of course) a little moody like all movie teens, and are kind of troublemakers, but are really both good kids at heart. But other than the ghost thing there's nothing about them that registers as noteworthy. I mean, you usually want your protagonists to be interesting characters in interesting situations. Here, it just feels like it happens to them because, hey - it has to happen to someone for there to be a movie, right?
Horror-wise? Get ready for a lot of quick-cuts of a sort of Ring-looking/decayed body ghost thing. It can be a little jolting at first (the film is pretty well shot and edited), but it loses a lot of its effectiveness when you realize that's really the only trick Haunt has up its sleeve. I don't recall an awful lot of gore or anything... for most of the film, it actually felt pretty tame for an R-rated movie. (I mean, I guess there are teens - God Forbid - smoking pot here.) But by the end it earns an R. There are some okay attempts at building tension, but again, once you figure out the types of scares you are going to come across you start to anticipate them. And the film looks almost *too* crisp for its own good. There's some potential in the house to have a decent sense of atmosphere, but things look too sanitized for that. I don't know if it's the lighting, or if it looks too digital - regardless, it looks off, and the overall feel suffers for it. But like the rest of the film, it's not bad enough to get excited about - it just never really works as well as it could.
The story is okay, and I guess you get a reasonable explanation for the haunting. I'd say Haunt tips its hand a little too early as far as the plot goes, so there's never much of an "a-ha" moment like there's supposed to be.
So I wouldn't call Haunt a bad movie - it's certainly competent, at least. But there's a thin layer of boredom and dullness covering the averageness here... it passes the time okay, but there isn't much to take away from it - good or bad. It just kind of is.
I would not recommend this film.
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