Reviewed by Cal Kemp

Just so we have it straight right off the bat: Seance is a pretty stupid but otherwise inoffensive run-of-the-mill low-budget horror. It boasts the dubious talent of Vacancy-writer Mark L. Smith as both writer and first-time director and the sad fact of the matter is that he's just not cut out for the later and questionably up to par as the former.

Set in a college dorm during Thanksgiving break, a few 20-somethings have stayed behind in a nearly-empty building rather than head home to their families. Four of them are friends; Lauren (Kandis Erickson), Melina (Tori White), Alison (Chauntal Lewis) and Diego (A.J. Lamas) but are joined by a mysterious student shut-in named Grant (Joel Geist) and a perverted old campus security guard called Syd (Jack Hunter).

Lauren immediately begins having visions of a little girl named Cara (Bridget Shergalis) whose spirit seems to haunt the building. Grant offers up the exposition that the building has long-since been haunted by her ghost, leading the others to perform a seance which -- much to their chagrin -- accidentally brings back the girl's killer -- a creepy janitor named Spence (Adrian Paul) who incessantly whistles "The Itsy Bitsy Spider". 

Now everyone's trapped in the dorm and has to fight off the evil ghost who'd like nothing more than to see them all dead. Sadly, while all the elements are more or less in place, the film is just never anything special. It's not particularly scary or bloody or sexy or clever. Characters are weak and have bizarre little almost-backstories that tend to make you scratch your head in confusion rather than believe any sort of development.

One of the biggest problems, though, is that the horror rules we're given are never appropriately established despite blatant periods of exposition. We never really know what ghosts can or can't do and rules we are given are then broken and new ones made up on the spot. 

The sole special feature outside of a few trailers is a short featurette about the production which amounts to nothing more than no-name actors talking about how important they felt their characters were and what attracted them to the script. It's superfluous and fake except, perhaps, in the case of Mark L. Smith himself who tells the camera with a big grin that every single day on-set he'd learn a whole bunch of things about directing that he never knew. That fact, at least, comes through in the final film.