I know this title sounds really stupid, but I've heard from more than one person that this movie is good, so I have higher hopes than I otherwise might. I like haunted houses and haunted house attractions seem fun in theory, but the more deeply involved ones where the actors are allowed to touch and push you? I wouldn't go to one of those. No thanks. No desire to actually live in a horror movie, kthx. But since I find that idea so scary, movies that feature a haunted house or haunted attraction like this seem like a lot of fun to me. We'll see if this one lives up to the hype.
So this movie is about a haunted house that planned to open in a town in upstate New York. Everyone involved with the production died except for one person, and that person shot some video from the opening night and uploaded it to YouTube before the police could stop it. Someone else broke into the haunted house after it closed and took pictures of the carnage inside, and those found their way online as well. From this evidence as well as conflicting eyewitness statements, the movie pieces together the story of what happened the night of the tragedy. The movie is pieced together itself from bits of interviews and the mysterious footage taken inside the house the night that the deaths occurred. It's a cool kind of way of stitching together a horror movie from scraps, like a crazy quilt of horror.
The performances are pretty good here. The found footage really does seem like someone's vacation video, though, and I mean that's as boring as it sounds. Maybe I'm losing my patience with found footage movies, who knows. Plus the "hell houses" that I'm familiar with aren't regular haunted houses, they're haunted house types of attractions put on by churches to show the evils of sin and the horrors of hell, hoping to scare people into becoming Christians. A lot of churches across the US put on attractions like these, and there was even a documentary movie made specifically about these types of haunted houses (it was called "Hell House" without the LLC) so that's kind of what I was hoping for with this movie, so when it turned out to be a regular haunted house found footage flick, that was kind of a let down. Bummer, dude.
Once the action starts...you realize there isn't much action here. Basically all it is, for an hour and a half, is this group of friends fighting all the time and trashing each other, intercut with footage from interviews of people trashing the crew after the fact. Sure, it's easy to stand on the outside and point out someone else's mistakes, but it seems really petty when interspersed with the found footage this way. I think it would have honestly been better if they'd shown all these interviews that occurred after the tragedy at the beginning of the movie, and then just let the found footage of what happened be the bulk of the movie, and not tried to splice in these interviews like snotty little "I told you so's." It's annoying and just highlights how unscary the rest of the events in the movie are. I'm sure it was scary to be in the house while some of this stuff was happening, but "I guess you had to be there" totally applies. And the haunted house they're supposed to be building has really crappy sets and props that look like they took five minutes to put together. I have scarier decorations on my balcony for Halloween.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point. I wanted this movie to be good, but all it did was remind me of the better similar movies I've seen and make me wish I was watching one of them instead.
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