The Vault (2000)

The Vault may be the worst of the Full Moon/Big City Pictures urban horror films — which is quite an accomplishment — not so much because the script, acting, or direction is so much below the others, but because the bad guy — unlike in Killjoy, Ragdoll or even The Horrible Doctor Bones — is so dull. Basically, Sahzuku (Parris Washington) is the ghost of an African witch doctor who was brought as a slave to the Los Angeles area (eh?) back in the day. After killing some of his fellow slaves, he was put on time out, and when that didn’t work, he was locked in “the vault.”

A couple of hundred years later, a high school teacher takes some of his students to the abandoned building housing the vault so that he can teach them about history, or fondle them, or whatever it is he has planned. Tragically, the vault is opened, and perhaps even more tragically, the kids don’t learn a damn thing (except maybe how to die). The teens are like a black Breakfast Club, complete with the jock, the nerd, the juvenile delinquent, and the pretty girl, all of whom are utterly expendable. The dialogue and the acting in The Vault duke it out for which is more stiff, and in the end, its message of “don’t forget your past” feels like a haunted after-school special.