Crew
Director/Screenplay/Producer – Michael Feifer, Photography – Hank Baumert, Music – Glenn Morrissette, Makeup Effects – Gage D. Hubbard & Aubrey Jensen, Production Design – Nicole Ruby. Production Company – Barnholtz Entertainment.
Cast
Alexandra Holden (Rachel Beckwith), John Burke (Stephen Javitz), Sid Haig (George Beckwith), Bill Moseley (Chief Murken), Tim Omen (Frank Sullivan), Leslie Easterbrook (Marge Beckwith), Micah Costanza (Deputy Murken), Caia Coley (Mrs Sullivan), Mike Korich (Arnie Howard), Shawn Hoffman (Brian)
Plot
Rachel Beckwith is a successful tv journalist in New York City. One evening she is woken to find an intruder in her apartment during which her boyfriend Brian is stabbed to death. Six months later, Rachel has gone to stay with her parents in Fillmore to recover. She believes she is ready to return to work and takes a job as a reporter at the local newspaper. There she is assigned to do an article on old houses of the town. The one house she enters is the abandoned home of Frank Sullivan, a doctor who murdered his family and others. While there, Rachel encounters a ghost hunter and sees him killed, before finding that he died years ago. She believes the ghost of Sullivan’s wife is calling out to her to help solve the murders.
A Dead Calling was the third film for director Michael Feifer. Feifer has previously made a couple of other horror films with Lethal Eviction (2005) and The Graveyard (2006). He followed this with a couple of others Grim Reaper (2007) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest (2008) and then went on to specialise in a series of films based on true-life serial killers with Chicago Massacre: Richard Speck (2007), Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007), Boston Strangler: The Untold Story (2008), B.T.K. (2008), Bundy: An American Icon (2009), Drifter: Henry Lee Lucas (2009) and Gacy: Serial Killer Next Door (2024). In the 2010s-20s, Feifer left the horror genre and now churns out a series of family films and tv movies.
With A Dead Calling, Feifer tells a standard Haunted House story. The haunted house and ghost story film is a majorly tapped out genre – there was huge upsurge of low-budget entries identical to this in the mid-2000s, which exhausted the genre in a big way. And needless to say, Feifer does little to enervate the tired cliches and lacks the directorial skill to make the film spooky. This is paced and has a visual blandness that makes it look like a tv movie ghost story.
That said, there are points that the A Dead Calling starts to become more interesting than that. For a time, there is a weird rubber reality to what is going on where Alexandra Holden encounters ghost hunter Mike Korich in the house and they join forces – only for her to see him abruptly killed and to then discover that he died years ago. And then the doctor who we assumed dead turns up still alive and starts killing more people. It is certainly gets a little more bloody here than the expected direct-to-video ghost story.
The big conceptual problem of the story is this. It starts out with Alexandra Holden being drawn to investigating a haunted house. Spooky things occur. The assumed-to-be-dead doctor turns up and starts killing. There is a big predictable twist about Alexandra’s true identity. At this point, A Dead Calling starts to pivot into being a completely different story about the one it started out being. It is no longer a work about a haunted house and becomes one about a murderous doctor. The ghosts that were haunting the house prove to not really be spooky after all, merely ones calling out for Alexandra to grant them closure.
Feifer gives us an interesting cast. He has a tendency to go for actors who have B-movie reputations. In this case, he casts Sid Haig, who was just seeing a career resurgence as a result of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses (2003). It is unusual to see Haig playing a regular nice guy for once – in this case, Alexandra Holden’s father. There is also genre regular Bill Moseley as the sheriff. In addition, Leslie Easterbrook, the trainee cop who was a joke because of her big breasts in Police Academy (1984) and sequels, play Alexandra Holden’s mother.
Trailer here