This film is chock-full of familiar faces and while it seems to borrow heavily from other popular films of the last ten years, it’s done well enough to deliver a few scares.
Plot Synopsis
After a failed suicide attempt and a stint in rehab, a troubled teen returns home and soon after starts seeing ghosts of children killed almost fifty years earlier in an accident on the train tracks. As she tries to unravel why, she also discovers clues that the train accident might have been no accident.
Fingerprints in Depth
[Caution Spoilers Ahead]
Troubled teen Melanie and her boyfriend try to commit suicide in a drug-induced haze. Only she survives and after a stint in rehab, returns home to a family and town that wants nothing to do with her.
Her sister Crystal invites her to a party and on the way home, Crystal’s boyfriend takes them by the city railroad crossing where fifty years earlier, a school bus full of children were killed by an oncoming train. Urban legend says ever since that accident, when cars stop on the crossing, something mysteriously pushes them off the tracks and leaves small fingerprints.
They test this theory and Melanie actually sees the ghost of one of the children from the bus. This girl seems to keep appearing after this, warning of other deaths. Of course, everyone she tells thinks she’s back on drugs. Left to her own devices, Melanie discovers there really is a killer out there and also discovers that the bus accident was no accident…but how are the two tied together? Well, that would be giving away too much to reveal that here.
The film features several well-known faces (Lou Diamond Phillips, Sally Kirkland and “The Hills” Kristin Cavalleri) and the acting in Fingerprints is well done. Meanwhile, the script, while borrowing from films like Final Destination, Urban Legend and The Messengers, provides a fresh spin on the genre with the ghost children plotline woven in and actually delivers on a few of the scares.
The last ten minutes are totally unnecessary, but it seems commonplace nowadays to have these kind of endings in order to leave the films open to sequels – even if in name only.
Worth Watching?
The film has a good balance of psychological tension and blood-letting, while providing an interesting plot twist near the end that links the bus crash to present day slayings. Definitely worth renting
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