100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012) Reviews

• My Review Of "100 Ghost Street:The Return Of Richard Speck"

  ASouthernHorrorFan2012-10-02

  "100 Ghost Street" is a found footage paranormal flick from The Asylum. It is told through recovered documentary video footage retrieved from the stories set location. A team of paranormal researchers head out to record any phenomena where the infamous killer Richard Speck murdered several people. The film stars Jennifer Robyn Jacobs, Jim Shipley, Tony Besson, Jackie Moore, and Hayley Derryberry. "100 Ghost Street" begins just as most of these found footage paranormal ghost stories do by setting up the story with video sequences that conveniently introduce the location and purpose of the visit. In this case a documentary investigating the paranormal activity at the scene of grisly murders committed by Richard Speck who along with his victims is said to still be haunting the location. There is nothing that really sticks out in this film as groundbreaking or original but it is a pretty good movie. The story is believable and comprehensible. The action begins almost immediately and convincingly. The special effects in this film is standard play in this subgenre and is done very well. There is plenty of gory death scenes and melodramatic acting from the cast. The scares are not so much instantaneous or shocking but the whole film is pretty entertaining. There is really nothing in this film that stands out as nail biting or 'edge of your seat chills' but the film manages to keep you interested by showing a steady amount of action and drama. I actually found it to be a very enjoyable paranormal film that brought the blood and gore. The effects are not high end but they are better than a lot of the films in this subgenre of horror. If your looking for sudden chills or scare moments that make you jump then look elsewhere, but that aside it is a very good ghost story. The atmosphere is creepy, the location is dark and the story behind the paranormal activity is gruesome. I think any paranormal movie fan will be pleased to see this film.

• why do I bother with Asylum movies?

  jinx_malone2013-03-24

  Minor quibbles: Richard Speck didn't rape and kill the student nurses in a hospital, he raped and killed them at their apartment. I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does. The Asylum have a habit of altering history in their other films when the truth would work just as well--their Amityville film and the Anneliese Michel picture are both good examples of this, though at least the Amityville film is so bad that it crosses the line from suck into awesome. As an aside; for whatever reason I get offended when the stories they choose to tell are about real people. Just write your lousy dung about characters that you bothered to make up using your imagination. Impossible I know, since they have none. Or write your story with this in mind and then change the names to protect the innocent or whatever. File off the serial numbers. If I were a member of the families of the murdered girls, this movie would work my nerves even more than it already does. Same thing with the Anneliese Michel movie. Instead of scaring me, all I could feel was annoyance that they couldn't let this poor person rest in peace. Richard Speck was a piece of garbage, why do I have to watch a movie where his ghost rapes some chick? How sanctimonious of me, I know. On to the review. Not much to say, to be honest. The movie is boring. Nothing good to say about it at all. Kills are ripped off from better films like REC and we even get a low-budget Entity callback. If you want a fun found footage film done on the cheap, go watch Grave Encounters, which is also a piece of crap but does have a sort of interesting premise. Mostly, the Asylum pisses me off because they actually make money on these awful films. However, I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm totally envious of them for that very reason, so there you go. They suck, this movie is awful, they make money, I am jealous. The end.

• Found crap

  movieman_kev2013-03-03

  There's a good thing/bad thing dynamic to Instant Netflix, good in that all the dubious Asylum 'films' go on it before too long which means aside from the monthly fee, one doesn't have to spend a dime on this crap. The bad news is what you save in money, you lose in sanity. So a toss-up if you will. This particular pile of excrement is one of the endless "found footage" movies that are as numerous as they are atrocious. A few friends go to the boarding house that Richard Speck murdered in half a century ago only to be stalked by a poltergeist. Yawn. Bad all the way around. The fact that its unwatchable is redundant as its an Asylum film.

• Seriously, What Just Happened?

  dissock-12013-07-18

  What happened to the last 84 minutes of my life? What happened to filmmaking standards? What happened to hope? One thing that The Asylum films pretty much has going for it is consistency. 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck is an Asylum film in every way - but sadly, that's not a compliment. As far as found footage films go, this is one of the worst that I've had the misfortune of seeing. And I'm easy. The setup is similar to what we're accustomed to in films of this ilk, so I can't actually take any points away for that. The technical aspects of the film follows time-worn convention; it's pretty much what you'd expect to see for a micro-budget film of this particular sub- genre. Low light, jerky camera movements, and poor sound. Again, no surprises there. Where this film really excels at ineptitude is in the low level of acting involved and in its extremely poor storytelling. For 3/4 of the film's running time, viewers are treated to excessive yelling, frantic posturing and hysterical emotional bursts from an earnestly amateurish cast. Bad acting has been a staple of this type of film since Blair Witch, so I for one, EXPECT it. However, it's the LAST 1/4 of the film that really bites; the actors collectively go into this whole other realm of over-emoting that I've rarely ever seen outside of a badly- directed grade school stage play. Please people, for God's sake, take more acting classes. Improvisation is an art; please take it seriously. And if you know what's good for your "career", I'd suggest steering clear of films produced under the Asylum banner. Clearly, no good can come of it. The atrocious acting in this film is outdone only by the extremely lazy storytelling which has characters making the stupidest choices possible and taking the most inexplicable courses of action. Repeatedly. Finally (just because a lack of accuracy happens to be a pet peeve of mine), I'd give this film a huge "fail" in the research department. For the record, the building where the actual murders of the nurses took place was in a townhouse. Also, in actuality, Richard Speck killed 8 nurses in that townhouse, not 7 which this film repeatedly and erroneously mentions. The manner in which Speck's original victims were killed is also misrepresented in this film. There are more factual errors that I could mention, but chances are, you already get the picture. For future, it'd be nice if writers who work on dreck like this would actually take the time to at least get facts right, so here's a little shout-out to all those inspiring, creatively-deficient screenwriters out there that intend on tackling real-life events: it's not that difficult - Wikipedia is only a few mouse clicks away and it's freely available to anyone.

• Not horribly horrible

  mark-christopher042013-12-18

  Like so many of these movies, it was made on a way to low of budget, with no talent whatsoever. The idea is sound, of course, lock a crew in a hospital, of course over night, of course with a ghost the loose, and of course nobody believes in ghosts. The acting was super horrible, the plot I liked, but the whining of the actors made me want to turn it off. Round and round in circles it felt this movie went, most of it wasn't believable but hey, these movies aren't supposed to win Academy Awards now are they? I wouldn't watch this movie if unless if you really had to, or if you are like and love these types of movies, its a definite watch!