Directed by Michael A. Gaetano in 1976, Haunted begins in a small southwestern town while the Civil War is still in effect. We learn of an Apache Indian woman named Abanaki (Ann Michelle) who has been falsely accused of stealing the horse belonging to a soldier (Aldo Ray) and who is subsequently punished for her crime by being tied topless to a horse and sent off into the desert to die. Before she leaves, she says she'll be back and put some sort of curse on the solider and on a priest (Paul Vincenzo) who were actually conspiring together to steal some gold.

Cut to 1976 where that same small town is now a movie ranch run by a kindly blind woman named Michelle (Virginia Mayo), her oldest son Patrick (Jim Negele), his younger brother Russ (Brad Reardon, SILENT SCREAM), and their uncle, a cranky guy named Andrew (Also Ray). Into their lives comes a beautiful English woman named Jennifer (Ann Michelle) who looks an awful lot like Abanaki from that opening scene. She is on her way to California when her car breaks down and Patrick takes a liking to her. They hit it off and she hangs around for a while until her car gets fixed, which only serves to irritate Andrew, who believes Michelle to reincarnated and possibly responsible for his brother's death. When, at the insistence of Michelle's doctor (Paul Vincenzo) Paul winds up driving his mother to a sanitarium to rest for a while, Andrew decides to show everyone how crazy he may or may not be. When it turns out Jennifer's car won't be ready for a while, he figures she, as Abanaki, is out to get him and figures he should get her first. Meanwhile, Patrick is singing love songs to her in the desert while she's questioning his sexual orientation.

Rarely is a film as disjointed and unusually incoherent as Haunted, but here it is on DVD regardless. A fairly fabulous disaster, the movie doesn't make a damn lick of sense and it isn't even close to the horror movie that it's been made out be in the past. In fact, it's more of a boy meets girl love story with random disgruntled Aldo Ray scenes thrown in for good measure. The film features a few remarkably bizarre moments worth mentioning though - the first of which is the 'death by topless horse riding' opening scene in which lovely Ann Michelle lets everyone know it's cold outside. Why they'd chose to execute her this way is questionable as it doesn't look like it'd be all that tough to escape, but a little gratuitous nudity never hurt anyone, right? The second scene involves Patrick taking Jennifer out on the town to 'live it up.' Where do they go? A pizza parlor full of old people featuring some guy playing a pipe organ. Now anyone who has been to a small town knows that sometimes entertainment can be difficult to come by but surely there had to be something more fun than that to do. Then there's the love scene, where Patrick and Jennifer are hanging out by a campfire. He sings her a song and strums his guitars, and she asks him to help her take her bikini top off - he obliges, at which point she asks him for no evident logical reason if he's gay or not. Throw all this together with random scenes in which an inebriated Aldo Ray growls and yells and punches and makes sharp pointy sticks out of broom handles and you wind up with a movie of very questionable artistic merit, but one that is bizarrely entertaining in its own inconceivable way.

Make no mistake about it - this movie is awful in every way a movie can be awful, but it does feature some interesting cast members, a horribly catchy theme from Billy Vera, and Aldo Ray apparently dubbing his own bad self as he was two loaded while the movie was being shot to utter his lines with any sort of intelligible quality to them. Subplots disappear completely - why was the priest reincarnated as the doctor only to disappear? What about that hidden gold that meant so much in the beginning? Why does Jennifer appear completely normal and not at all possessed by the spirit of an angry, vengeful Indian maiden? What the Hell is going on with Andrew's relationship with Michelle? Do we really need to see Aldo Ray take his shirt off and make love to a woman at this stage in his career?

This one will make your head hurt.

NOTE: THIS REVIEW IS BASED ON A TEST DISC THAT MAY OR MAY NOT REPRESENT FINISHED RETAIL PRODUCT.
Video:

Haunted looks okay in 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen but far from amazing. Given that the film was shot on a low budget and that there were a lot of problems during production, most of this seems to be source related (why does Ann Michelle always look orange?). There isn't much in the way of heavy print damage, just some specks here and there though some of the night scenes are pretty dark - again, appearing to be the way that the film was shot. There aren't any compression artifacts to spot nor is there any edge enhancement. The movie more or less looks fine for what it is.