This film looks good on paper. It's directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and features a number of good actors, old and young. Mädchen Amick in the lead role provides an outstanding performance. In fact, there's no bad acting in this film. Unfortunately, the old actors in this film are wasted. Anthony Perkins was not given a chance to be interesting. He is a fairly one dimensional professor character who seems to exist only to be inserted into the film here and there to explain the supernatural background of the story. He should have been given a better script. R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket) is always good to watch, but the script makes his police detective character a walking cliché (and the script makes him jump to the correct conclusions implausibly quickly). If you're a fan of Gilligan's Island, you also have ~90 year old Natalie Schafer (Mrs. Howell) in her final role. However, she is given almost nothing to do at all. In this film, it seems like all the good lines are given to the younger actors. I particularly liked Daisy Hall (an actress who seems to have completely disappeared) as cousin Gloria. She plays some very effective horror scenes with gusto (if she hadn't stopped acting, Daisy Hall would have been a good horror queen). Only in Daisy Hall's scenes, did I see real flashes of Tobe Hooper's genius (although the earliest scenes in the film, with a coffin, were pretty good too). After a perfectly okay beginning and middle, the latter part of this film was pretty disappointing because the script began to get silly. This film is not a bad way to pass the time, but it's not the best of Tobe Hooper's work.