Scared Stiff

  I get a little excited whenever I find an 80's horror movie that's got decent production but I haven't even heard of. The sad truth, though, is that with more than 30 years as a horror fan if it's not foreign or a tiny budget miracle, there's probably a reason I didn't know about it.

 Scared Stiff is a haunted house yarn with a heavy debt to Poltergeist and House directed by Richard Friedman, whose best known movie is probably Phantom of the Mall: Erik's Revenge. This one is... not nearly as good as either of its main inspirations, nor is it as fun as Phantom, as far as I can remember that one. It tries, though, bless its cheesy, poorly acted heart - and that counts for a lot.

Pitching to the rafters

 The haunting in the house is due to a Voudoun curse that isn't just poorly defined, it's flat out not thought out at all. Apparently the master of the house in the bad old days, George Masterson (David Ramsey, who doesn't have a lot of credits besides this) was a rich, famous musician with anger management issues. For extra asshole credit, he also moonlighted as a slave trader.
 His white man rage only got worse when a bunch of rebellious slaves magic'd him into slowly becoming a monster. Perhaps recognizing that turning an all-too human monster into a wrathful, literal one with ill-defined supernatural powers isn't the best of ideas, the plantation slaves gave Elizabeth, George's saintly wife an amulet to protect herself and their son.

 Couple hundred years later, a doctor (Andrew Young) buys the house and moves into it with his famous pop star girlfriend  Kate (Mary Page Keller, a veteran TV actress who classes up the movie a little) and her young son. While Kate starts seeing the ghost of George everywhere, her boyfriend becomes more and more of a douche, until... eh, you can probably see where this is going. 

 Meanwhile, the bodies of Evil George's centuries-dead wife and kid are found in a chest in the attic of the manor, and David decides to gaslight Kate and try to convince her that there's nothing wrong.
 It's mostly fairly boring psychological horror, but with a decent side of overt supernatural stuff going on - the house has an infestation of psychic pigeons which at one point engineer a handyman's hanging, a kid's playset becomes animated (because Poltergeist, I guess), and cheap even for their time computer graphics come out of a screen in a gloriously crappy attempt to try and foreshadow stuff. These bizarre occurrences mostly don't make sense, but it's all good cheesy fun - the problem is that they're used far too sparingly until the movie goes properly off the rails for a very House finale complete with stumbling across different realities, and it finally lets loose with some gooey puppets and elaborate makeup effects.
 I wouldn't want to get anyone's hopes too high -the designs are a bit meh, and the madness is evidently restrained by a low budget- but it's definitely worth watching if this sort of thing... telekinetically lifts your bed.

Calling it here, Michael Bay saw this before producing his Ninja Turtles movies.

 Compared to other low-budget bits of weirdness made outside of the system, this is actually not too bad - it looks professional (if a bit TV movie), it's obviously got a decent budget, and they do try to make it varied and interesting. There's a lot of 'what the hell were they thinking' moments but they aren't really that much worse than on other movies that are remembered much more fondly (not that they count against these type of movies). And if 80's nostalgia is your thing then you're in luck, as the movie is heavily dated by many, many of its choices.

 Unfortunately, the most memorable thing about Scared stiff is the truly terrible acting from all the male principals, including the kid - it's the fun kind of bad, and David Ramsey's silent-movie-style scenery chewing is wildly entertaining. 

 In the end there's a reason these things get buried. They'll get rediscovered and maybe get a bit overrated every now and then by people hungry for the stuff, but as far as forgotten 80's horror movies go... I'm sad to say this one kind of deserves its obscurity. But I had fun with it.