Carolyn is CEO of the powerful Unico (Genericonglomhugeco!) Corporation, which…does…some stuff, I guess. Anyway, after she sees a window washer thrown from his platform on the 29th floor of her building by an invisible force (only to land on and squish a visiting CEO from the European division of Uniconglomhugegenericorp), Detective Dennis Randall is called in to solve the mystery.

Randall thinks nothing of the incident until he starts having strange visions of a ghostly figure in the building. Shortly after the window washer falling to his Jackson Pollock-ey death, a security guard is killed by something in the elevator, and Dennis’s partner Jim is possessed in the lobby and goes on a shooting spree until he is shot to death.

After a whole bunch of obnoxious crap with Carolyn working late in the big spooky building and being haunted by the most irritating, tone-deaf synthesizer score in film history, we finally find out that the ghost is that of her late husband, Phillip, who disappeared and was presumed dead several years ago.

Dennis calls in Dr. Max Gold, parapsychologist ordinaire, to investigate the building. After the ghost violently kicks him out by chasing him with exploding light fixtures, he calls in a friend of his named Sergei, who is clairvoyant to the point of being driven to suicide attempts by it. After the movie grinds to a screaming halt to send Dennis and Max chasing after Sergei on suicide watch, the three men and Carolyn all wind up back at the Uniconhugecoglomgenericorporama building to face off against the angry ghost. Big fuckin’ surprise, overachieving career woman Carolyn killed her controlling husband to gain possession of the business…that…does…things, and stuff.

Anyway, Phillips mummified ghost finally shows up and chases Carolyn until she winds up at the concrete wall in which she buried him. In the movie’s one and only cool sequence, the wall explodes to reveal Phillip’s decaying corpse trapped in the concrete. He springs to life and drags Carolyn into the wall, which seals itself behind them.

I think I’ll get my RAM chip and say the good thing about the movie first. I like the way Dr. Gold addresses pieces of running machinery as he’s talking to the ghost. Ghost movies tend to bore me. A floating apparition saying, “boooooo!” at someone doesn’t do much for me. It’s a fucking incorporeal specter, dude. Just walk through it. The types of supernatural stories I prefer are ones where the entire environment is hostile. Evil Dead, and more recently 1408 (which is surprisingly kickass), are perfect examples of this. A floaty ghost in a mundane environment is not scary. A situation where a person is trapped in a possessed and malevolent environment where every bit of their surroundings is trying to kill them is much more interesting. There are no rules, everything is dangerous, and the whole point of the story is to drive you insane by defying logic and making you feel like you’re in a completely different dimension where it’s perfectly normal for a book to come to life and try to chew your arm off.

Unfortunately, while it’s addressed here, they never bother to run with it. In the end, it’s still just a moldy old ghost trying to get revenge. This movie plays like a feature length episode of “Tales from the Crypt”. I kept waiting for the Cryptkeeper to pop up and fire off a bunch of bad puns during the end credits, but all I got was more of that fuck-awful synthesizer bullshit. Shame on you, movie. You should have pun-cracking corpses instead of crappy new-age keyboard noodling.

Every scene with Michael Moriarty is, of course, inherently entertaining because it’s fuckin’ Michael Moriarty isn’t it? The dude is so goddamn charismatic he could probably steal scenes from Christopher Lee by standing in the background behind a bush reading a newspaper. Unfortunately, the movie never really knows what to do with him, so it’s up to him to carry the whole show while every scene he’s not in feels like dental surgery.

It also doesn’t help that the damn thing keeps shifting gears, and forgetting to push the clutch in. The result? Stripped gears and a pissed-off incarnation of eschaton itching to reach for the remote and just fast-forward through all the parts that don’t have Moriarty, and pretend the parts that do have him are scenes from The Stuff. We go from murder mystery, to ghost story, to a scene between Dennis and Dr. Gold that was practically lifted wholesale from The Mangler. And what the fuck was up with that Sergei on suicide watch thing? His character didn’t even fucking do anything! It’s like the crew was standing around and someone said, “Well, we have $1000 left and fifteen minutes to pad out, and Kevin McCarthy owes my cousin a favor”.

You know a movie isn’t standing up to scrutiny very well when five other movies, as well as three book series, are talked about just as much as the movie at hand. In other words, if you’re a Moriarty completist, check it out. Otherwise, do something fun, like flossing or pumping out your septic tank.