Horror comes from all ports these days, folks, and today we’re going to get a look at a little nugget of terror that comes our way from the folks at the Independent Film Channel called The Skeptic.

The Skeptic features a whole bunch of surprising actors, including Wings’ Tim Daly, perennial tragic figure Tom Arnold, and Star Trek’s Zoe Saldana as they discover some baffling things about the paranormal.  When a lawyer’s aunt dies, she leaves the house to her nephew, a fairly bitter, cranky individual who has a serious problem with emotion.  As in, for the most part, he doesn’t have them, and he definitely doesn’t like them.

But when the house turns out to have some serious problems, well…things are only going to get stranger. But the question remains–do the strange events ha

The Skeptic is a movie that has a lot of interesting twists and turns to it, and presents plenty of interesting principles to play off of.  Zoe Saldana is wonderfully creepy and Tim Daly is just unbelievablyThe performances are also terrific–frankly, I hadn’t expected Tom Arnold to actually turn in a good performance.  But he did…in fact, he even managed to scare me once.

How often is it that you get a good quality jump scare out of the guy who once played Stanley Stupid?

It’s a little old fashioned in its setup–they use musical cues to full effect, making you jump with a crashing piano chord.

Perhaps the only real problem with the movie is its ending.  It’s actually something of a letdown, all things considered.  They had this fantastic buildup that they just didn’t manage to use to its freaky, scary fullest.  They punked out, for lack of a better term.  Sure, the ending they had was actually kind of heartwarming, but still…it could have been a wild frenzy of creepy excess on a truly epic scale.

But still, The Skeptic did pack the creepy, at least for the first, oh, five sixths or so, and that’s reason enough for the Screenhead Ten Scale to hand this creepy little package an eight out of ten.  Fantastic stuff, this.