Seance (3 Stars)

Amazon Friday #25

Admit it! You thought I'd forgotten about my Amazon Friday feature. No, I still intend to continue with it, despite having suspended it since November. I also want to continue with my Disney Wednesday and Netflix Thursday features. I have an ever growing list of films on Disney Plus that I want to watch, not quite so many on Netflix, but I'm giving priority to my True Stories marathon. I'll just sneak an occasional film in when I have time to watch two films in one day. I'm busy as a full time baby sitter, so it probably won't be too often.

"Seance" is a film about a girl called Camille Meadows who enrols in an exclusive private school for girls, Edelvine Academy. A place has become free after a girl died following a seance. She fell out of her window, and her death was ruled an accident, but was it really suicide, or even murder?

Soon the girls are doing it again. They hold another seance to speak to their dead friend, to ask how she died. After the seance another girl dies. What's wrong with those girls? They don't learn from their mistakes. They continue to hold seances, and after each seance there's another death.

There's nothing original about the film. It's the same sort of supernatural tale that's been told many times before. The director should at least have capitalised on the abundance of pretty girls. Shorter skirts or glimpses of nudity. The nudity wouldn't even have been gratuitous, it would have made sense. The girls all go to bed at night fully clothed, so that when there's a loud noise we don't see anything when they jump out of bed. That's just silly.

"Seance" was heavily promoted at last year's Fantasy Film Festival, but it's gone straight to video. It's destined to be forgotten.

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Addendum on 29 January 2022:

Within minutes of publishing this post I received a complaint from a friend of mine. It wasn't a comment in this blog, unfortunately. My personal friends usually comment in Facebook. This friend found it offensively sexist that I wanted more nudity in the film. I'll repeat here what I replied to her.

First of all, my words shouldn't be taken at face value. I have a whimsical, irreverent sense of humour. I often make statements that don't express my personal opinion in order to raise a smile from my listeners and/or readers.

In this case, what I said was half true. I don't expect the film to be remade with shorter skirts or bare breasts, but what I wanted to say is that if a film has nothing else going for it, at least it could have a little nudity. Most films that I watch have no nudity, and it doesn't bother me. But they're good films. If a film isn't good, only glimpses of bare breasts can tempt me to watch it again.

And in this case, the lack of nudity was artificial. The girls only went to bed fully clothed in order to avoid nudity. That's not natural. No schoolgirl just takes off her jacket and tie and jumps into bed. That's not natural, unless the room is freezing. A normal girl would put on a nighty, or at the very least strip down to bra and panties. That's what I wanted to see.

I hope this explanation is enough to satisfy anyone else who doesn't like what I said. I welcome comments in the box below this post. Let's get a discussion going.