100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012)

Whew—this one’s so derivative it could have been shot with a Xerox machine. It’s yet another:

·        Tale of an overnight ghost hunt in a haunted location

·        Group of numb-nuts young adults who think they can strike it rich by taping their effort to capture a ghost in the camera

·        Collection of things that go terribly wrong

·        Series of deaths as we count down the crew members who get bumped off in desperately unimaginative ways

·        Poorly written, poorly directed rip-off of Paranormal Activity with a soupcon of Blair Witch tossed in for, hell, I don’t know why. 

This motley crew and onscreen talent go to the student dorm where Richard Speck tortured, raped and murdered seven student nurses on the night of July 13, 1966. That’s true, of course—you can find the details easily enough. How you feel about taking such a horrific crime and turning it into such lame entertainment is your business. 

So anyway, seven of the eight team members lock themselves into the building, they say to keep vagrants from coming inside. It makes sense, except for the fact that there is only one key to let them out again. When the director of the project gets sliced in half (why and how we don’t know—Speck didn’t hack on guys) and the key is in his pocket, we realize just how stupid having only one key is. 

Okay, one gal gets ghost raped and murdered, one guy is hanged, one gets chewed up in a drain pipe, and the others get killed in ways that are as forgettable as the characters themselves. Believe me, life is too short to memorize details from movies like this. 

The film we see is what was left behind when the ghost hunters were taken up to that Haunted Mansion in the sky, presented to us courtesy of the Illinois Police Department. Say what? We get this credit at the beginning of the film and since it’s a pretty good guess that there is no “Illinois Police Department” the filmmakers waste no time in shooting the this-is-real-folks-it-really-is in the found footage. 

There are no actor or writer or director credits but the cast is made up of Jennifer Robyn Jacobs, Jim Shipley, Tony Besson, Jackie Moore, Hayley Derryberry, Adam LaFramboise, Mike Holley, Chance Harlem, Jr., and the unseen Nancy Leopardi and Steve Mencich as ghost voices.  Leopardi wrote and Martin Andersen directed.  

It’s all sadly lacking in everything  it shouldn’t be lacking in, and brings nothing new to the party to make up for it. This is the kind of movie that having something else to do for 90 minutes was made for.