There used to be a cocktail once that contained gin, absinthe and, possibly, brandy - I can't remember. I do know, however, that it was more-or-less banned back in the 1920s for causing effects similar to brain death.
This film is the visual version of that great drink.
The plot is implausible at best, the characters are the sort that make you truly wish that they would suffer and die, preferably quickly, and the special fx, if there actually were any used, were less interesting even than the characters.
Firstly, the film wasn't horror. It certainly wasn't even scary. It most definitely wasn't even logical.
Three ubiquitous horror film staples - college kids - find themselves involved with an ancient coffin containing some actually quite wondrous clockwork devices that enable the person lying in the coffin to experience existence as a ghost.
An interesting premise, but it goes downhill from there on. The director apparently equated "ancient" with the fifteenth century and then filled a typical 19th century coffin with all manner of cogwheels and little rocking thingies and dinky widgets, gadgets and twinkly Faraday electric arc effects to create a machine that is marvellous to the eye which, and this is important, is ALSO a fabulous music box in the Grotesquerie style: imagine Stravinsky's weirder works blown through a sound attenuation device and echo chamber.
Add to this a "Mechanical Death" stalking (in a gentle, non-frightening, non-disruptive manner) the guys using the machine and you end up with a film that - with just a little rewriting, re-editing and a new set of actors who actually CAN act - would make a fairly good Gothic comedy horror.
Naturally one of the students falls victim to Death's barely discernible wrath; one goes totally demented and becomes a stalker/rapist/generic psycho - but not too violent, of course - while the third somehow manages to rehabilitate himself from thief/junkie to all-round Good Egg in order to save the day.
If, after reading this review, you feel a sudden urge to rush out and get this film on DVD or download it from the Internet, please consider psychiatric help.
I've given three stars to the film for one simple reason: the wonderful Antikytheran clockwork machinery. Well, maybe half a star went to Aaron Dean Eisenberg for being rather cute...
I'll shut up now.
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