It’s 10:22 am
I love a good haunted house story. When it’s done right like Jason Stutter’s “The Dead Room” ,a house with secrets to keep can be downright scary as hell. So when the cheetah and myself got a chance to check a short haunted house short film from UK director Scott Lyrus,we signed up for the ride. Did we need to call Ghostbusters?
The film opens with a woman greeting an older man who has been hired as an assistant to help set up some audio equipment. The woman,Jo,is a unpleasant and unfriendly to the man,Frank.
As Frank is working,he is surprised by the woman’s companion and the head of the little group,he is a professor but we don’t know what of. The professor says Jo can go but she wants to stick around.
Frank is spooked by his friend Fred who basically tells the who story’s set up in one statement. The two men ask Jo and the professor about the backstory of the house and they list all the usual suspects in most haunted house stories. Jo answers each question by Frank and Fred more and more nastily.
Then Jo begins to tell the story of what happened to the happy Lambert family whose lives were changed in one fateful night……
“A mysterious Professor, his smart ass assistant and two terrified AV techs, enter an infamous haunted house in an attempt to explore the dark history of the home, but discover it maybe their own dark history, and not the house, that truly haunts them.”
The above is the synopses for “Echoes” and I’ll be honest,I would have LOVED to have seen that film. This movie would have been a lot of fun if Lyus had lost Jo and the professor and had just featured Frank (Tony Sands) and Fred (Mac McFadden). These two old codgers brought a breath of fresh air to an otherwise scrambled and scattered story. At 20 minutes,you feel like you were dropped dead straight in the film’s last act. There is no beginning or middle and for a short film with a short run time,that is a bad flaw to have.
Jo (Sophie Tergeist) is such a unpleasant character who is also insane and the professor (Paul Dewdney) mumbles his lines so badly that we couldn’t can’t make them out unless you’re sitting right next to the speaker. The audience gets zero empathy for these two when in fact it’s Jo and the professor we should care about.
As for “their own dark history”,uh,three of the four characters have no “dark history” and the only mystery involving Frank and Fred was which pizza they had delivered.
The lighting for the film,which is set in one room really needed to be a bit brighter,I know Scott was trying to set a certain mood but we needed to see the characters just tad more. The score was very effective and does it best to help ramp up the suspense.
Despite this film being not so good,it does have it’s good points. I do believe that Scott has the genesis into making a fun film if he uses Sands and McFadden on their own as amateur ghost busters,I would love to see Frank and Fred again!!
The cheetah and I split on “Echoes of the Passed”,he fell asleep while I found Frank and Fred just enough to give it a weak thumbs up. Scott Lyus definitely has promise as a director and I want to see what he does next.
The Inner Circle 