Be forewarned: this review is going to contain a lot of spoilers, but<br /><br />this is so necessary in discussing this wannabe complicated film.<br /><br />May Britt plays Ingrid, a lonely rural woman who lives on a farm<br /><br />and faithfully attends church. A masked killer is terrorizing the<br /><br />small town and there are plenty of suspects: town bad boy Frankie,<br /><br />Ingrid's mysterious uncle Carl, and the new stranger guy in town.<br /><br />The sheriff, played by Aldo Ray, is perplexed. He finds out his<br /><br />daughter was knocked up by Frankie, plus he must deal with<br /><br />having two Barney Fifes as deputies. Ingrid is also having many<br /><br />visions/hallucinations involving her mother, who killed herself after<br /><br />a tryst with a strange man. Ingrid, just five years old, walked in on<br /><br />them and mom fled into the bathroom. It is no mystery that the<br /><br />man in bed with mom was mom's brother, Uncle Carl.<br /><br />Ingrid is attacked by the masked killer but escapes. Later, the killer<br /><br />murders the local town lush and dumps her body in Ingrid's<br /><br />chicken coop. Ingrid is later raped by Frankie, and Uncle Carl<br /><br />almost walks in on them. Frankie threatens Ingrid if she talks, and<br /><br />the murders in town continue. Ingrid is a fixture at church, and is<br /><br />almost raped again after an attack in the cemetery. Eventually, the<br /><br />masked killer turns out to be the mysterious stranger. Frankie,<br /><br />however, shows up at Ingrid's house, bounds Uncle Carl, but is<br /><br />stabbed to death by Ingrid. Carl buries Frankie, makes an<br /><br />incestuous pass at Ingrid, then disappears after Ingrid goes to the<br /><br />sheriff.<br /><br />The sheriff guards Ingrid's house until the morning, when the<br /><br />deputies can come and dig up Frankie. Instead, Frankie pulls up<br /><br />very much alive, and the deputies find a grave with Ingrid's goat.<br /><br />Ingrid is upstairs in the bathroom, dead from suicide.<br /><br />The sheriff also gets a surprise when Uncle Carl flies in from New<br /><br />York. He has not seen Ingrid in years, despite Ingrid's claims to<br /><br />the contrary. Uncle Carl visits Ingrid's house, and remembers how<br /><br />he slept with his sister before he drowned her in the bathtub, she<br /><br />did not commit suicide. The final scene, the scariest in the film,<br /><br />has Mitchell in the bathroom, running hot and steaming water, and<br /><br />turning around to see a misty figure standing in the bathtub- Ingrid.<br /><br />This thumbnail sketch might make this sound very suspenseful,<br /><br />almost Hitchcockian, but it is far from it. May Britt, as Ingrid, tries,<br /><br />but she is failed by the script. Her Scandinavian accent is<br /><br />explained away as she spent time in "a European orphanage up<br /><br />the coast." Huh? Cameron Mitchell, who has never been good in<br /><br />anything, is not good here. The film makers give him the world's<br /><br />worst fake gray hair at the film's conclusion: the chalk white goop<br /><br />looks like it was applied with a trowel. The rest of the cast plays<br /><br />their routine small town characters without adding anything new.<br /><br />The biggest mistake here is the convoluted script. There are at<br /><br />least six different places toward the end of the movie where the<br /><br />final credits should have started rolling. Clocking in at 97 minutes,<br /><br />this is fifteen minutes too long. Poor Britt spends most of her<br /><br />screen time either taking off her clothes (careful not to show any<br /><br />nudity) or hysterically running away from men, real or imagined. All<br /><br />the men here come off as horny and stupid. Ingrid is the<br /><br />repressed frigid queen who fantasizes about being attacked and<br /><br />raped. She is religious, and Hollywood has been telling us for<br /><br />years how strange and sexually repressed churchgoers are. The<br /><br />script never takes any chances, beating the viewer over the head<br /><br />with heavy handed images from Ingrid's psychotic mind. While<br /><br />there is some suspense here and there, for a horror film, there is<br /><br />not much.<br /><br />The possibilities here were endless, and the film makers did not<br /><br />take advantage of them. This should have been very suspenseful,<br /><br />considering the game cast, but everyone loses to a silly script and<br /><br />terribly low budget. "Haunts" does not haunt.<br /><br />This is rated (R) for physical violence, some gun violence, sexual<br /><br />violence, some profanity, some sexual content, and adult<br /><br />situations.