Ok, so “in a few hours” turned into “in a couple more days” but I am finally here to get caught up on the blog just in time to need to write another one tomorrow. No days off for good behavior. Cash on the barrelhead.

This time we’re talking Harland Manor. As far as I can tell, this is the very first Tubi Original horror film, though the way they manage their library makes that impossible to confirm. The film was written and directed by Stephen R. Monroe, who horror fans most likely know as the director of the 2010 remake of Meir Zarchi‘s 1978 extreme horror classic I Spit on Your Grave. He’s also done what appears to be several dozen made for cable holiday movies, Lifetime and Hallmark Channel stuff. I love that resume.

Here’s your plot description straight from Tubi: “While documenting paranormal activity inside an abandoned boarding school for wayward girls, a ghost hunting team realizes they’ve become the hunted.” If that sounds like a story you’ve heard before, well, that’s horror. Much like scary campfire tails, we get a lot of variations on themes, but how does this one play?

Without spoiling anything, I would say this was the kind of film that you wouldn’t regret giving 90 minutes to on a lazy afternoon doomscrolling your streaming libraries, overwhelmed with choices, but you might be a little underwhelmed if you picked it special for movie night. It’s solid, but not reinventing any wheels, so your level of enjoyment of this is likely to simply parallel your enjoyment of this sort of story in general. I’m not the biggest haunted asylum movie guy, but this was decent. 3/5 Skulls.

Alright, if you don’t want spoilers, read no further! For the rest of you, on to the recap!

Evan, Gil, Jeannie, and Zeke work together on a paranormal investigation TV/Streaming show, and they are going to shoot their big season finally at the legendary Harland Manor, a sort of combination hospital/asylum/home for wayward girls run by the evil Doctor Harland, who abused the girls and performed illicit abortions, including one on Sarah Anne, one of the children he had raped and impregnated, and who died during the abortion. Doctor Harland got found out, and killed himself in the Manor. And now the place is haunted by both the ghost of evil Doctor Harland and the ghost of Sarah Anne, one wanting revenge and the other wanting to do more terrible shit even in the afterlife. To make a long story short, everybody dies, and Sarah Anne recruits the ghost of Jeannie into her mission to destroy Doctor Harland, and they are now the big fish haunting to Harland Manor pond. The end. Oh, wait. There was also the whole bit in there where Evan and Jeannie were secretly bangin’ and she was secretly pregnant and then Sarah Anne made her have a miscarriage and that’s how they bonded, I think. Now the end.

The film alternates back and forth between a traditional movie production and a first-person “found footage” (I didn’t know it was lost, hyuck hyuck) style, as you might expect from a movie about people making a ghost hunting show. They managed to find an excellent shooting location to get a lot of production value out of what was surely a tiny budget. Ghost movies don’t typically generate a lot of tension for me, but I thought some of this was more effective than the average bear, especially the early scene when Gil first encounters the ghost of Evil Doctor Harland. It’s a bit of a slow burn, but really turns up the gas in the last 15-20 minutes with some genuinely good horrorshow, including a particularly effective stabby bit.

If you’re just looking for a spooky ghost story that won’t ask too much of you and will get you through an easy hour and half, give Harland Manor a shot.