Seance

 I have a lot of time for Simon Barrett, a writer who's mostly known for scripting most of the films of his buddy Adam Wingard - as far as I'm concerned, the duo have a lifetime pass for their early work: You're Next, a couple good segments in the first two V/H/S films, and (especially) The Guest.

 Seance is his only full-length movie as a director so far (he wrote it as well). It's not that great, but it's dumb, cheesy fun.

 Camilla (Suki Waterhouse) arrives at the exclusive Edelvine Academy for Girls, a replacement in the middle of the year for another girl who died in mysterious circumstances.

 She soon runs into trouble by picking a fight with the school's mean girl clique, and gets locked into detention with them. As it turns out, the dead girl used to be a part of their group, and her death came soon after they performed a ritual to invoke the Edelvine ghost, a local legend rumored to haunt the school halls. The whole ritual was a prank, but we all know ghosts can't really tell the difference.

 Having learnt no lesson at all, the girls decide to perform a seance to find out what really happened to their friend, and they're all surprised to find the ghost is pretty talkative (they use an improvised planchette to do automatic writing); The spirits, as they are wont to do, warn of bloody murder. And sure enough, one of the girls gets stabbed while walking the school grounds that night.

 You know the drill; while the girls stage their own investigation, someone stalks them and picks them off, one by one, until there's a final confrontation. The story falls mainly within the category of mystery-focused slashers, but it also includes a minor splash of the supernatural with a sprinkling of visions, nightmares and ghost sightings.
 The solution to the masked slasher mystery is one-half extremely obvious, one-half absolutely ridiculous (and out of the blue); There's also one more (unrelated) twist afterwards that's absolutely bullshit - a fun idea that makes little sense on its face and further falls apart if you give it any amount of thought. All this dumbness is offset by the film being knowingly trashy while still treating its preposterous story with all seriousness, which I appreciate.

 The other thing that won me over is that the film gets progressively gorier as it trundles on. The first few deaths are very PG13, but things take a turn about an hour in with a close-up of a throat slashing that's clearly a reference to Italian horror, and from there there's a fair amount of well-realised gore. Things sadly don't ever cross over into full-on action the way The Guest did, but there's a similar feel as one of the characters reveals not-very-well-hidden reserves of badassery.

 The acting is... fine. Everyone's playing very predictable, well-established types, and that includes Waterhouse, who's otherwise gives a very enjoyable performance as a take-no-shit style lone wolf. The filmmaking doesn't particularly call attention to itself, but what little action there is is clear and the film is fairly atmospheric, with some good suspense-building. There are a few scenes shot in the dark which the digital cameras turn into a murky visual soup, but maybe I'm just over-sensitive at the moment after watching Nosferatu.

 All in all, it's fine - vacuous, teen-friendly horror with precious little of the smug tone that turns me off films like Scream and that lot. Maybe it's that close-up of a throat wound, but it really did remind me of the crappy horror films Italy would put out by the dozens in the eighties. Lacking as it does the sort of madness that would put it over the top, I doubt I'll remember any of it in a year or so - still, good fun.