South Carolina resident siblings Carrie and Chris face a huge dilemma. A heartless tycoon, Mr. Practer, has bullied local businesses into selling their property so he can build a country club - and the family shop is the only one left who hasn't relented. If their mom can't come up with $300,000 in the course of three weeks (due to an accounting error made in the 60s, as pointed out by Practer's IRS accomplice) they'll lose it to Practer and have to move. But perhaps all hope is not lost. Leaving the kids under the care of their grandmother, the mom throws herself into meetings with people hoping they'll be willing to lend money to the cause. And with Carrie and Chris' best friends, oddball inventor Jesse and preppy girl Natalie, along for the summer-time visit, the kids soon come across an old ghost story that may have an answer. It seems a woman named Carolyn dropped an expensive bracelet in the forest surrounding Grandma Lenny's home years ago, and her spirit haunts the grounds, seeking it out. If they can find it, perhaps their money woes will be over. Carrie, the amateur ghost hunter (who doesn't really do much more than walk around and talk into a recorder) of the group, can't resist making real contact with the beyond.
This movie, while not exactly on the same level of painful and bad as Max Magician and the Legend of the Rings, is still pretty B-movie.
Warning, spoilers below!
-99% of the cast barely count as actors, reciting their lines with an awkward stiffness you'd see in an elementary school play.
-Jesse has an incredibly strange sounding voice that I swear must be dubbed. No kid talks like that.
-While it's always referred to as "the shop," we are never told what kind of shop it is. The vague (and rather cheap) decorations give no clues and no more than one table is ever full at a time. How do they stay in business?
-The whole "a poor nurse and her daughter living in a cabin in the woods" thing was just confusing. Why was she running home? Didn't she have a car or couldn't she take a cab? Did she usually walk to the hospital? How did she die, exactly? So many questions!
-Don't even get me started on Gus, the weird old guy who claims he met "the Queen" and conveniently remembers at the end he has a bag of $300,000 worth of cash just sitting around his house. What the heck? If he had the money, why didn't he help them earlier?!
-I think it's a little disrespectful to take something your great-grandmother died trying to deliver, and put it up on Ebay (or whatever that was supposed to be) immediately. Sure it was to save "the shop" but, geez. And how convenient that it was worth exactly $300,000.
-Apparently, slight breeze = ghost!
Overall, unless you're a fan of bad movies or have a cousin, sibling, or child who eats this stuff up, I'd stay clear. Watch Ferngully or something.
Buy the DVD at Amazon
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