"Haunted" starts with a prologue written on the screen and, immediately after, the same text is processed into a sequence as well. It certainly isn't the biggest blunder you can make, but it does somewhat illustrate the intelligence level of the film. Either you do a written text or you do a sequence, but not both. Then again, the pre-opening credit sequences, taking place during the US Civil War, are undeniably the best parts of the entire film.
A beautiful Indian woman gets falsely accused of witchery by a corrupt priest, and she's sentenced to a very strange and perverse death. The poor girl, named Abanaki, is tied to a horse, stripped naked, and then sent into the dry and hot desert to die. Some say - and I quote the prologue - that her spirit roamed around for more than a hundred years for revenge. And guess what happens a hundred years later!
"Haunted" is also the type of clichéd horror film in which characters reincarnate as exact replicas of their ancestors. The corrupt priest reincarnates as a grumpy ranch owner, and Abanaki returns as a beautiful traveling girl whose car breaks down at that same ranch. This film had the potential to be a simple but effective supernatural horror tale, but writer/director Alessandro De Gaetano stuffs his screenplay with lots of senseless nonsense, dead-end twists, dull sub plots, and insignificant supportive characters. There's a phone booth in the middle of a cemetery, sinister wooden statues without any purpose, an elderly blind lady playing the organ and fantasizing about sex with her deceased husband (while she actually has the plump and hairy Aldo Ray on top of her), and two dorky brothers chasing after the lewd Abanaki-reincarnation.
I can tolerate quite a lot of weirdness, but the complete lack of action and gruesome deaths in "Haunted" is unforgivable. There's one notable highlight, involving spilled petrol and a spark from a light bulb, but it's not enough. De Gaetano put too much time and effort in the dedicated soundtrack, and the casting of Anne Michelle (in a successful attempt to find a girl with perfect breasts).