I was looking for a movie to watch on Halloween night, and I somehow ended up in this Abandoned Mine. It's about five young people going on a Halloween night adventure, so I figured I would just go with it. There were some warning signs early on. First, the opening credits reveal that the film was written, directed and produced by one person (Jeff Chamberlain) -- and that almost never leads to a good outcome. Then we're hit with some quick snippets of bad things to come, long before the story premise even establishes itself. Why do filmmakers do this? It's incredibly annoying.

So we finally get the five main characters established, and it just doesn't feel right. You have Brad (Reiley McClendon), his girlfriend Sharon (the very attractive Alexa Vega), Brad's ex-girlfriend and Sharon's good friend Laurie (Saige Thompson), Brad's generic jock sidekick Jimmy (Adam Hendershott), and Laurie's friend Ethan (Charan Prabhakar). From the start, I felt that there was just something off about Brad and Laurie, especially Laurie, whose sketchy backstory ends up being pretty much of no importance. Thank goodness for the India-born Ethan, as his personality serves to at least make the movie somewhat enjoyable. The other characters are just sort of there for the ride.

So the gang accompanies Brad to a haunted mine. For some reason, they all seem to think they're going to some other haunted mine and not the locally infamous Jarvis Mine, where a man and his two daughters were supposedly buried alive (intentionally) a century ago -- and where several people have gone missing over the years. Of course, despite all of their reluctance to actually enter a dangerous and supposedly haunted mine, they have few qualms about shimmying 20 feet down into it with a rope and -- you guessed it -- getting stuck down there. It's pretty hard for me to care about anyone stupid enough to do that sort of thing.

The film does manage to drag out the answer as to whether or not the mine is actually haunted, but no real surprises await the viewer. There is very little in the way of horror or suspense. Actually, things get a little silly toward the end, resulting in an ending that fails to impress. Nothing in this entire film really engaged me, not even the claustrophobic scenes of these young people crawling through tiny shafts.

Writer/director/producer Jeff Chamberlain also fails to really tie the disparate aspects of his story together in any meaningful way. If you're looking for something scary or unsettling to watch on Halloween night (or any other night of the year), Abandoned Mine really isn't going to be your best choice.