10 Horror Movies One Step From Perfection
7. The Girl On The Third Floor
This one stung, as former WWE star/infamous John Cena Summer-slammer CM Punk has plenty of potential as a lantern-jawed, self-aware leading man, and horror seems like the perfect genre for the former wrestler's theatrical charms to excel in.
And the actor is a Bruce Campbell-esque likeable presence throughout last year's creepy, atmospheric haunted house horror The Girl on the Third Floor. Playing a former playboy who has been chastened by life and is attempting to settle down, Punk's anti-hero could be an interesting character.
In fact, this gruesome and tightly-scripted ghost story has a clever conceit in the form of the question "what if ghosts tried to seduce a recovering sex addict?”
The film could have been a feature length expansion of Jack Torrance's ill-fated trip to Room 217 (or 237, pick your poison), but to pull that ambition off it really would need a more likeable protagonist instead of one who opens the film as a tool and only grows worse from there.
Yes, The Shining got away with making Jack crazy even before he arrives at the Overlook. But one, it's The Shining, and two, the film has Danny and Wendy for the viewer to get invested in once Jack's a lost cause, where this flick just offers us a doomed leading man for the most part.