‘Closed for the Season’ fails to deliver on good premise

Closed for the Season, the new supernatural horror film from writer-director Jay Woelfel, has a genuinely clever premise, but the movie is unable to build up enough interest in the characters or storyline to sustain one’s interest.

The best attribute the movie can boast is the real-life location of an abandoned amusement park in Ohio. The rides are all rusty and broken, instantly casting eerie shadows and feelings of looming terror. As a director, Woelfel is able to utilize the surroundings in an effectively creepy manner.

Aimee Brooks plays Kristy, a woman terrorized by distant memories of her childhood at Chippewa Lake Park. She visits the amusement park as an adult and finds herself trapped within its confines, unable to escape. The only person helping her along the way is James (Damian Maffei), whose presence in the movie is kept at a mysterious arm’s length.

Any description of the plot should come with a little disclaimer: Closed for the Season is a funky, almost psychedelic horror movie, where story comes second to experience. If you try to follow the action, you’ll get lost and feel disappointed. If you let the visuals wash over, you may be marginally impressed.

The two main characters are terrorized by a host of carnival baddies, including a lake monster and a creepy guy known simply as the Carny (Joe Unger in a nicely effective performance).

For genre fans, the frights in Closed for the Season are not terribly frightening, and the acting is borderline unwatchable. The lines of dialogue are cheesy, and the line deliveries never soften the script’s failings.

Woelfel’s story has a few interesting twists and turns, and the concept of becoming imprisoned in a broken-down amusement park probably reads well on paper. But the results are below middling. There’s never any investment in these characters.

There’s apparently some dark memory in Kristy’s past, but the audience glides ride over it without a second thought, mostly because she is never a compelling character.

The visuals are passable; however, some of the special effects in the beginning of the film are atrocious. There’s one sequence where a clown in a dunk tank is stabbed through the eye and mouth. Rather than being gross or scary, the entire scene is hilarious for its fakeness.

Closed for the Season simply doesn’t work. It needs more than a good premise to become a winner. Check out the vastly superior classic, Carnival of Souls, for a better rendition of a similar plot.

• Closed for the Season

• 2010

• Written and directed by Jay Woelfel

• Starring Aimee Brooks, Damian Maffei and Joe Unger

• Running time: 90 minutes

• Rating:

• DVD released from MTI Home Video on Aug. 23. Features include closed captioned, widescreen 2.35:1, 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound, behind the scenes, deleted scenes, trailers and optional Spanish subtitles.

• Click here to purchase Closed for the Season on DVD.