We've had more than enough haunted house movies as it is, so Deadline would have had to come up with something pretty original to keep a guy weary of the same old creepy mansion routine happy. The story - writer moves to old creepy house where strange things happen caused by some probably violent event that had occurred in the place - is not. The main character's background - of course something terrible happened in her past, too, coming back to haunt her - is not. The shocks - chairs moving, doors closing, floors cracking - are not. The secret - did something violent happen to the couple who used to live here before Brittany Murphy's character - is not. I'm not going to comment on the ending but you see where this is going. The only gimmick is a video camera Murphy finds in the house with tapes that explain what happened here before. Well, in the 70s they usually found tape recorders in those haunted houses as the home video market wasn't exactly booming back then. Just adding some new technology, however, doesn't make a story refreshing, more so as the tapes - which take in a large part of the film - are uninteresting and didn't make me care what happened to Thora Birch's character. Murphy and Birch don't find much to do with their roles, while Birch's psycho husband is rather annoying than menacing. the direction is not so much bad as just as uninspired as the story. Some scenes feel rather cheaply made; without Murphy as the lead you could think you're watching a low-budget made-for-TV movie.
Review of Deadline
