User Reviews

This movie is what you get when you try to stretch a paragraphs' worth of plot and about two sentences' worth of characterization into a hour-and-a-half story. This ghostly tale is equal parts dumb and boring and the few cheap scares it musters up can't compete with a plethora of astoundingly contrived scenes and a near total lack of recognizable human behavior.

6 months after her twin sister committed suicide, Megan (Elisabeth Harnois) and her 4 friends head out to a big house in the Louisiana swamps to celebrate the Summer Solstice before heading off to college in the fall. While she's there, Megan is tormented by frightening visions that revolve around a teddy bear key chain her sister always carried around. What looks like the girl from the well in The Ring movies also shows up a couple of times. After boinking her dead sister's ex-boyfriend and making goo goo eyes at a handsome local who knows a little cajun voodoo, Megan finally discovers the reason she's being haunted and how it's connected to a creepy redneck who lives across the lake.

From teenagers putting on suits and ties to hold a dinner party to a huge house in the swamp that's perfectly maintained without a caretaker, from a plot twist that makes you want to throw something at the screen to one of Megan's friends looking like a preppie who escaped from a 1980s sex comedy (including wearing a polo shirt with an upturned collar), there's nothing about this film that makes sense or resembles anything like reality. These filmmakers took a very old and very clichéd ghost story that everyone's heard before and just started stapling stupid stuff onto it.

There are 7 characters in the story, yet they don't even have one personality among them. The film throws a few dream sequences at the audience but never defines exactly when they begin. So when the dream sequences end, you're not sure what actually happened and what was the dream. There's a series of flashbacks to the night Megan's sister killed herself, but there's no connection between what's going on in the story and when we see the flashbacks. It's not like something happens that makes Megan or someone else remember that night. The flashbacks are just inserted into the film, like little bathroom breaks for the viewer. You certainly can take a whiz anytime a flashback happens, because none of them contribute anything to the story.

If its cast of attractive young people had at least gotten naked a few times, Solstice might have been almost tolerable. If R. Lee Ermey had gone the full monty, it might have become horrifically irresistible. As it is, Solstice is just another PG-13 horror flick where the only horrifying thing about it is that I paid money to watch this piece of crap.

OK this is no classic but it's not suppose to be one. The storyline is a group of kids go to a cabin after one of the kid's twin sister commits suicide under mysterious circumstances. As soon as they arrive, they get haunted by a creepy ghost. It is also a remake but I haven't seen the original so I cannot compare this film to it.

I think all the actors do a decent job though R. Lee Ermey definitely steals the show as a creepy resident in the woods. I think what I like about his character is the mystery that he carries with him which is what keeps me interested in finding out what his deal is. With the exception of his character, everyone else seems rather dull mostly because they have been done before with many other horror movies. You have the good girl who is the main character, the love interest who maybe holding a deadly secret and there is the joker who is a bit of a jerk. It's all too traditional to be but the performances of all the actors does make them very believable that you can see past those traditional clichés of the characters.

The film doesn't deliver a great deal of scares but when it does, they really work and that is best thing about this film. The ghost is very creepy looking and the story does keep you hooked as the characters try to find out the mystery of what it is that is haunting them and why the ghost is doing it. As in most nowadays ghosts films, it is all about what has happened to them that has caused them to be dead which I have no problem with just so long as the twist is something new which I found the revelation of the main villain who caused the ghost's death to be rather obvious but the identity of the ghost was a surprise. This was because the film would tease you to believe that the ghost was the main character's twin sister but it turns out to be someone different.

Overall, the film isn't very original but it does have some qualities such as believable performances, a surprising twist and some eerie scenes that should keep most ghost story fans hooked but don't expect anything new.

Well, those are the words that come to my mind when I think of Solstice.

How many times before a story following that same sort of plot has been told ? Zillions! Why ghost stories only know how to tell one type of story: Mysterious things happen. A particular person start to see and feel odd things. Is it a message from the "other side"? Nobody believes anything this particular person says. Then in the end of the movie the whole thing becomes clear after one or two plot twists. The body of the wandering ghost is found and then she/he can rest in peace, and justice is made finally.

Solstice has a nice production, but that is it. The story sucks. It is weak, deja-vu all over again.

From the writer/director of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT Daniel Myrick, who spins a tale influenced by a Scandinavian thriller MIDSUMMER. SOLSTICE is a haunting yarn about a group of high school friends getting together for one last blow out before heading to college. Less than a year after losing her twin sister to suicide, Megan(Elisabeth Harnois)joins her friends on a trip to the family summer home on the Louisiana bayou. Things get real bizarre when Megan thinks she is being contacted by her sister from beyond the grave. A local hunk(Tyler Hoechlin)comes to dinner and teaches the group a Creole spell of the summer solstice. They actually try and raise Megan's sister from the dead...not without casualties. Flashbacks tend to disjoint the whole story and gets tiresome quickly. Also in the cast: Shawn Ashmore, Hilarie Burton, R. Lee Ermey and Matt O'Leary.

I don't know what the budget was for Solstice, but no one is complaining about it's technical merits. It looks and sounds as shiny as an MTV video of the year. The cast is young and attractive--I would say they looked like they were straight out of a Noxema commercial, but I don't think those are around anymore. The plot contains a secret at the end and not much leading up to it, but that won't bother the target audience. If only there was a memorable villain, like Chucky or Jason, so that the kindergärtners whose parents allow them to watch anything and everything, could remember something to talk about with their friends. At least Jeepers Creepers had that flying scarecrow.

The kid who played Iceman in "X-men" and the dumb girl from "Mean Girls" take a vacation to the middle of nowhere with a group of friends. Central to this story is Megan, who needs some time away to deal with the recent death of her twin sister. Except that she is having visions and experiencing unexplained occurrences that seem to be some sort of communication from the undead. Is it her sister trying to tell her something? Or are the messages coming from the innocent girl that Iceman killed last summer and then buried without telling anyone?

You will only think this movie is original, well-written, or well-acted if you haven't watched very many movies. In which case, you won't care--you and your friends will be more geeked about having scored that six-pack earlier in the evening than anything that happens in any video you might be renting tonight.

An adult would find this extremely boring, predictable and immature.

If you are 15-17, you would probably enjoy this movie.

I would not let anyone under 14 see this movie, because of sexual themes and some shock-value spooks. There is basically no gore, just a bleeding finger.

Revenge from the grave is trite and unrealistic and it was done very poorly in this movie. The shove-it-all-down-your-throat ending was expected and not appreciated.

I can't say I cared if any of the characters lived or died, they were all irritating and unintelligent.

A generous 4 stars is all I can muster.