Aaah! Bad acting! Eeeeeek!
This film claims to be scary, and let me tell you folks, I was scared. The horrid acting terrified me. I mean, if this is the future of film, we should all light a fire and sit around it to remember better days. I think I could give a camera to a group of kindergarteners and they would churn out something better than this.
I suppose I should explain the plot. A group of exceptionally dumb college students move into a house with “an eccentric” owner. Eccentric is an odd choice to describe her—obviously insane and super-duper obviously the villain might have fit better, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well. Cheap sex appeal (I think this is beneath cheap, but the term fits well enough) and stilted, horribly written characters abound.
Even the haunted house, which in a sense is the most apparent character, feels worthless. I cannot put into words how horrid this movie is. I think the writers have never socialized. Maybe somewhere in Hollywood they have a bunch of people locked in caves where they make them only watch Adam Sandler movies while an electric blender that is turned on is thrown down a staircase over and over. The dialogue alone will make you want to vomit. Are these people going to die? I don’t care. I really didn’t while watching this, and neither well you. Oh, I was supposed to be talking about the house in this paragraph. That starting sentence is a poor topic sentence, folks. The house is nothing special, it seems nice, but many of the rooms and styles are anachronistic when put into comparison with each other. The setting doesn’t draw you in. Sometimes films that have a cool setting and a relentless pace (the Evil Dead remake comes to mind) the stilted acting can be forgiven. The lack of anything going well hurts this film beyond repair.
There is bad acting in horror and then there is this level of bad acting. People are usually kind of dumb in horror films. This move took that trope and ran with it. I have to be honest with you, I did jump at a couple of the cheap jump scares. I think it may have been more due to my falling asleep while the film was running than anything else, but I did in fact jump.
Just about every single character sees something by the third day in the house, and yet none of them leave. I hate this trope in all horror movies, and to put the stupid cherry on top of this shit sundae, they have to also have those who don’t see things not believe those who do. Friend, sibling who I have known for decades, nah, I don’t believe you. You must have just gone insane and instead of doing anything about that possibility I am going to be an asshole and walk away. I don’t know if they are trying to get us to root for most of these kids to die, but if that was the intention, I suppose the writers did something right.
Instead of jump scares, I should call them dumb scares. They are not only not very good, but they are too frequent. I’m going to get a soda—oh shit! I’m going to take a bath—aah! It is too constant, and the characters are too dismissive. The brother character is possibly the worst written idiot I have ever seen in a film.
The film tries to jam the whole historical haunting crap in, but there isn’t enough time in the (thankfully) short run time. Despite the movie being horrid, I am not going to reveal who the famous poltergeist is, but you will roll your eyes.
Some movies are so bad they are kind of fun to watch. This is not one of those. Don’t waste your time on this one. If the main onus of your characters not fleeing an obviously troubled area is someone’s birthday, maybe the creators of this film should try to find a fucking new career. 0/10
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