Shivers of Horror – Horror Book & Movie Reviews

Plot: After killing her abusive cop husband, Mike, Marnie returns to New York to serve the remainder of her manslaughter sentence under house arrest. But Mike’s vengeful ghost isn’t done taunting her in this gripping supernatural thriller. Meanwhile, Mike’s ex-partner keeps close tabs on Marnie, who must wear an ankle bracelet that doesn’t allow her to escape — let alone move past a 100-foot radius.

My Review: I had come across this a time or two on Netflix but based on the limited description of it, I didn’t bother with it. Then I came across a review on another horror review blog (The Girl Who Loves Horror) and decided that it sounded somewhat interesting (I didn’t finish reading that review for fear there might be spoilers in it haha!). Quite frankly I feel like I wasted my time.

This is basically the story of a wife who was abused by her cop husband. During one of the times of abuse she defends herself and kills him. She’s sent to jail for it, but is then released to one year of house arrest. To the same home where she killed him, heck, his bloodstain is still on the wall.

His ghost ends up haunting her but not by spooking her like most ghost movies, but by beating her up whenever he gets the chance, like he did in life. Once that started happening I was just not as interested…and it pretty much keeps happening throughout the whole movie. During it all, her husband’s ex-partner is keeping watch on her, and at first he treats her like garbage thinking she killed his partner in cold blood, but then later believes perhaps she’s covering for someone else, and that someone else is now abusing her so she keeps covering for them. He doesn’t believe her later when she tells him it was her husbands ghost. Well, not until he sees him for himself.

I like ghost movies, but I like to be spooked. There was nothing spooky about this movie, at all. It had potential with the fact that there were good reasons for why the wife couldn’t leave the house, and she was in fact trapped in there. Who would ever believe her that a ghost was “haunting“ her, but nope, he wasn‘t really “haunting“ her, he was there to abuse her and a ghost being there just to keep abusing his wife was boring to me.

Gore/FX: For the most part there wasn’t gore, until a brutal beating later in the film. It looks like they used most of their FX budget on this scene because the effects elsewhere are terrible. The ghost attacks someone in the house and beats the shit out of them. It gets pretty bloody and there are lots of obvious broken bones and whatnot. However, the special effects of the ghost were terrible. It was just a blurry see through computer effect that gets shakey from time to time. It looked awful and made the movie that much worse.

Sexual Content: Quick sex scene, nothing shown that I really recall.

Acting: I’ve read a couple reviews on Netflix that stated the acting in this was terrible. They really should check out some other movies, because this wasn’t nearly bad as some of the other Netflix streaming shit out there. At least in this movie there were actual actors (Famke Janssen, Ed Westwick, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Paré) that most people would recognize from other things. – heck I didn’t even know the husband was Michael Paré until I had to look up the right spelling of the names. You don’t get to see him too much. But I loved him in “Eddie and the Cruisers”

Overall: I personally would be embarrassed to have my name on this movie with those special effects. Obviously the actors don’t know what the computer effects will look like until after they are done filming the movie. But these are just not scary and overall I found the movie to be lacking just about everywhere and I was pretty bored by the last 20 minutes.

My Rating:

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