Save your money for something good and enjoyable

One of my all time favorites.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

At some point in time, every word or phrase that has the word "dead" in it will have a dozen horror movies built around it. Alice (Brittany Murphy) is a writer and has a "deadline." Her ex-bf is getting out of prison and she is afraid of him. Her slime ball producer allows her the use of a seclude house so she can be alone and write. Her girlfriend Becky (Tammy Blanchard) takes her out to the big house and strands her there for a week, at Alice's request.This is a good old fashion haunted house with creaky doors (no 3 in 1 Oil) that move themselves, dripping faucets, faint screams, and things that go bump in the night. The camera angles are excellent and give one that voyeuristic, being watched look, couple with the noises they create a haunted atmosphere. The gorgeous Brittany looks defeated and distraught.Through some unusual circumstances Brittany finds and views video left by the former occupants of the home, David (Marc Blucas) and Lucy (Thora Birch) a couple on the verge of breaking up. Lucy is pregnant. David has a video camera and is obsessive with it to the point where it bothers Lucy. Alice, who is on medication for some unknown reason, is also a bit obsessive with her camera. Good haunted house story. Kudos Brittany, wish you were here.No f-bombs, sex, or nudity.

It's sad to think what has happened to once promising actresses Brittany Murphy and Thora Birch: Murphy is dead, and so is Birch's acting career. But while the exact cause of Murphy's death is still something of a mystery, the reason for Birch's fall from fame is obvious… it's down to bad career choices like this one.Deadline stars Murphy (looking far from her best) as screenwriter Alice, who travels to an abandoned Louisiana house to try and finish a script on time; while there, she experiences several strange events that lead her believe that the house is haunted, before discovering a box of video tapes that reveal precisely what happened to previous occupants Lucy (Birch) and her obsessively jealous husband David (Marc Blucas).However, with Alice having recently recovered from psychological problems stemming from a troubled relationship, could everything that she is experiencing be symptoms of another breakdown caused by the stress of producing a new script? Well, duh! The whole ambiguous 'is there really a ghost or is she mad?' plot line is terribly trite, and with dreary direction from Sean McConville, who aims for 'atmospheric' but only achieves 'stupefyingly dull', Deadline is one hell of a chore to stay awake through.

"Deadline" is a very creepy film in many ways. The late Brittany Murphy looks like death, at least partly on purpose as her character, Alice, is very sickly but this is no way to remember her. It was literally like watching a diseased ghost, and that realism was too much for me.A writer in a remote house with psychological problems hears and sees strange disturbances but is it all in her head or is somebody, or something, trying to kill her? The story has been done many times before, and this wasn't a particularly good rendition of it. That's the main reason why the IMDb rating is so low. The filmmakers even seemed to get confused with the ending. They gave us a resolution but they hadn't quite worked out all the details.The film itself though, was very well shot. They set-up a creepy atmosphere from the very beginning and never let up. Subtle camera work kept up the same suspense level throughout. This film was made on a low-budget and they made it well.Recommending this is tricky. I was faithfully terrified - not so much because of the storyline but because of what I was watching. Brittany Murphy was so pallid and anemic, it was scary. And the atmosphere and slow moving camera shots were done so efficiently well, significantly better than most horror-thrillers that I have seen. If you want to be scared from a well-told story, you won't find that here. If you want to be scared from the realism, then you just might want to take a look. If I knew what I was getting myself into, I wouldn't have watched it. And yet, at the same time, I'm glad that I did - I like seeing low-budget independent films made well.

I just watched this horrid film 2 days ago. At no point did I think this was in any way good. The only reason I suffered/survived the whole thing was that I was trying to see if maybe it was one of those slow at first and then gets good movies. I was wrong. I spent the last two days trying to figure this movie out. The way it ended, it all made NO sense to me. Then as I was reading other reviews to see if anyone felt the same, or if someone had understood it and explained. Thankfully, someone did explain it. Sort of. It was more of a 'theory', but I'll go with it, since it made sense to me after I thought about it. Basically, Alice goes to the supposed creepy house to finish a screenplay, her 'girlfriend' drops her off and then leaves. Alice starts seeing/hearing weird things in the house. Alice finds a box of tapes and starts watching them. Uses them to write her screenplay. Witnesses a murder on it. Turns out a lot of what we saw, happened in her head. She was reliving repressed events. After, unfortunately remembering the movie, Alice called Rebecca at one point and asked her to look up information on David and Lucy. At the end, when Alice calls Rebecca again to tell her that David is in the house, Rebecca has no idea what Alice is talking about and says "I haven't talked to you in over a week, I've been worried about you." And that leads me to believe that the conversation with Ben didn't happen. For one, if Rebecca hadnt heard from Alice all week, she didn't really tell Alice that Ben was out of jail. Which lead me to believe that Ben isn't really out of jail... And he couldn't have possibly known where Alice is, nor could he have gotten her number.From what I gathered, Lucy=Rebecca, Alice=David... and Ben seems pretty unimportant...but maybe he plays Davids mom or the one that 'David' thought 'Lucy' was cheating on him with? Who knows.. If you notice, at the beginning of the movie, when they're in the car, Alice has the video camera and is recording Rebecca. At the end of the movie, Rebecca goes downstairs to look for David, she finds only the video camera on the floor and on the tape she sees herself on a bed, just like when Alice first found the tapes and it showed Lucy on the bed and David recording her. There was so much and nothing at all going on in this movie at the same time.