The Haunting of Whaley House (2012)

Written and directed by Jose Prendes.  Starring Alex Arleo, Stephanie Greco, Arielle Brachfeld, Graham Denman, Carolina Grappa, Jason Owsley, Howard McNair, Ralph William Tarr and Maria Olsen.

Plot: a tour guide breaks herself and some friends into a haunted house to do a bit of ghosting… and shit goes awry.

In this unintentional comedy, Penny (Greco) is a tour guide for the actually infamous Whaley House in San Diego.  She is skeptical that ghosts even exist though. Most of her friends however, want to believe. So, when a woman on one of her tours has a seizure and claims she saw something, her friends convince her to take them into Whaley House after it closes for the night. Her boyfriend, Alex (Arleo), and his friend, Craig (Denman), are really in awe of the place. Craig’s black cousin (???), Ray (Owsley), is also excited when he is invited. So excited that he brings a famous psychic, Keith Drummond (McNair), with him. He’s black, too, which we want to point out is just too convenient. The only invited black guy brings another black guy who happens to be psychic and British? What? Anyway, there’s also two other girls that come, Vanessa (Brachfeld), Craig’s girlfriend, and Giselle (Grappa), both of whom get way too upset, way too quickly.

Once in the house, they all attempt to talk to the ghosts in the house. Turns out that the whole Whaley family is haunting the place, but Penny still won’t believe, even when things start moving on their own. Then, one of them accidentally falls down the stairs and dies. Then, they can’t get out of the house at all. Then, there’s shaking, crying, yelling and more dying.

Penny has got to be the most annoying character of them all, even ahead of Vanessa and Giselle, and of course she’s the main girl. So, there’s annoyances and unfortunately, this will NOT scare you, but it will make you laugh and that was enough for us. It really was so bad that it ended up being quite good. I mean, with lines like, “Breathing’s for gays, dude”, how could it not be satisfactory?! We watched this with a friend on one of our traditional horror movie nights and were not disappointed.  Maybe it got a little boost because the other two movies we picked were crap. Who knows? What I do know is that there was an awesome boob shot done in the very unsophisticated way we love.  Ray is a crazy, drunk, Carlton-Urkel guy who screams intensely at the ghosts.  Keith looks likes Seal and just may be the greatest actor in the world.  And there’s Alex who has very odd facial expressions that had us laughing so hard we cried.  We especially like what we have dubbed his “I need to shit on a cold day” face.

Sure the ghosts fingerprints look like caviar.  And yes, the ending is poorly done.  And yes, for some odd reason, the credits song, “Giving Up the Ghost”, sounds like it’s just a Halloween song being sung by Jem and the Holograms. But that stuff is CLASSIC given the right things framing it.  And this had at least some of the right things.

My score: 69. DJ’s score: 60. And if you’d like to know our friend gave it a 67.

“I’m just gonna go before I get murdered.”