(There are spoilers throughout this review) Well I caught this made-for-TV movie on Lifetime last night. I was flipping channels and happened to catch it right at the beginning, and once I saw Jeri Ryan was the star I decided to watch it just for a while -- but wound up watching the whole thing -- so I suppose that's some kind of positive note. The first 20 minutes are a tad slow and you're not exactly sure what's happening, that is until a scary gnarly hand appears behind an ornate air vent, like whatever it is wants to get out. Yikes! Ah ha! So THAT was the "secret" behind the wall...." and it lured me in. :-) Anyway, it continues from there as your usual haunting / ghost story / scary old house story: Lots of mysterious eerie things happen, ghostly beings are seen in the windows, one person realizes something's wrong but no one believes her until it's too late, the new owners do research at the library of the house's strange history, then the inevitable 'possession' occurs, then a medium tries to 'rid' the house of the spirit, then the final big showdown between ghost and humans, yada yada yada. The same story we've seen dozens of times, only this one is a low-budget made-for-TV movie, so everything seems to be scaled-down a tad and stretched out to make a reasonable running time.

The good: Jeri Ryan and the girls, especially Molly, are good and believable actresses. The interior of the house and the basement are scary so there's good set design and cinematography (especially that foggy old neighborhood). And when Jeri's brother finally discovers "the secret behind the walls", it's actually pretty scary.

The bad: First of all, there is no way -- no matter how deeply discounted a house is -- that a single mom, having been employed for just 1 day with what looks like an hourly job, and after being out of the workplace for 5 years, will qualify to buy a house of that size in that neighborhood. And after all the scary lead-up incidents, it does go kind of downhill once 'the possession' starts, and by that I mean it's not as scary and loses a little credibility. When Lizzie has her accident on the stairs and Jeri Ryan does CPR for some reason, my first concern was that Lizzie risked being paralyzed, not just knocked out. There's also a scene where Jeri finally hears the music box and it wakes her up -- but WHO was that person in the bed next to her???? And toward the end, Jeri confronts and gets mad at the real estate lady (twice), as though she were a villain and the cause of all Jeri's problems. I realize real estate people will do and say ANYTHING to sell a house and I'm sure that's what the writers intended, but I didn't think she did anything wrong - like she said, she was simply hired by the out-of-state new owners to sell the house and she didn't know it was haunted.