Jessie Holden (Trish Coren) reluctantly accompanies a small group of friends on Halloween night to an abandoned hospital said to be haunted. The place has been rigged for fake scares, so it takes them a little while to realize they're not alone with either the living or the dead. Among the former are a young man (Michael Samluk) in search of his younger sister, who disappeared into the building several days ago; there are already several among the latter, even before the former start joining them.
BOO! is one of those movies, like SESSION NINE, where the setting thoroughly creeps you out even before anything has happened. The hospital looks legitimately ghastly, like any number of horrible things have occurred there in the past and are primed to occur before our eyes.
Director/writer Anthony C. Ferrante makes the very most of the surroundings, coming up with an internal mythology that is complex enough to be intriguing without being opaque. He also eschews the genre conventions that dictate all characters must behave with suicidal stupidity and instead comes up with likable focal figures and more organic, original ways of putting them in peril. He's also helped immeasurably by the quality of the effects, which are inventive, gory and much more viscerally apt than one expects in this budget range (credit Ferrante's background in effects, as well as Wasner's enormous skill).
The mostly youthful cast is very good, with leading lady Coren projecting a mixture of good sense and wistful vulnerability. M. Steven Felty radiates malevolence as the primary adversary and Dee Wallace-Stone registers warmly as a heroic nurse.
BOO! is a fine variation on the haunted house film, this time done with characters we like and visuals where more is more.
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