House of the Damned

This was a letdown in many ways. The location filming in Ireland, though quite beautiful at times, cannot save this uninspired flick. Greg Evigan and Alexandra Paul, as the married couple trying to get their marriage back on track and who inherit a haunted mansion, just aren't interesting characters. Paul, towards the end of the film, becomes incredibly annoying and one wishes she would just close her mouth and shut up, as it seems she is screaming as if it has just become an Olympic event! Other problems with this film are odd segments that have nothing to do with the core of the film, such as the opening sequence with two cleaning women and the woman in a bed with a severed hand climbing over her writhing, naked body. Although the woman is quite adequate doing this it does nothing storywise. One is left thinking the production team needed to pad out a short running time and just tossed in some padding and a bit of T and A. The CGI effects are cartoonish as well and the fiery finale rivals co-executive producer Roger Corman's much earlier and far superior film The Fall Of The House Of Usher in all its ineffective cheapness. Any attempt at true tension and suspense, and as a result chills, are thrown out the window in this low budget bust. If you like images of Ireland you might find something here but you would do better renting or buying a travelogue. Skip this unless you are undiscriminating and think plot is secondary. Rent another low budget ghost story(if you can find it) titled The Woman In Black and see how good and scary a movie can be. This was a wasted opportunity.

All these one star reviews and claims of one of the worst movies ever are not accurate. You can go to the horror category at Netflix and Amazon Prime and 99% of those movies are far worse than this. I am not sure what people were expecting. It does borrow a little from poltergeist but so what? Movies borrow from each other all the time. Put Vincent Price with this same script and that alone would raise it two stars. That is how important acting is with low budget movies like Corman's. 4 to 5 stars is about right for this.

"House of the Damned" (also known as "Spectre") is one of your low budget haunted house horror flicks, filled with mediocre performances and cheap effects. It is about a family that inherits an old Irish mansion, and after moving in begin to experience strange phenomenon and ghostly apparitions, including the ghost of a young girl who was murdered and buried within a wall in the mansion's basement. The couple's young daughter is then whisked away into some other dimension and they seek help from a group of paranormal investigators for help.

The ideas this film borrowed from the 1982 haunted house film "Poltergeist" are obvious. I will say that this movie does have some slightly creepy sequences, but it is sometimes very, very boring. The acting here is nothing special, the mood is alright, the score (which was mostly this dramatic Irish opera music) was somewhat annoying, and the CGI special effects are really horrible. I mean, it was 1996, you would think they could have done a little better than they did. The ending where the house was on fire was the poorest special effect I've seen, very very cheap. But hey, this was a cheap movie.

Also, the translucent monster wolf thing that their daughter sees looks horribly fake. And what was it's significance in the film anyway? What the heck does a wolf-monster have to do with a haunted house? The special effects in here are what really ruined this movie. The acting was pretty bad too. I usually enjoy many low budget horror films, but not this one. "House of the Damned" is nothing special at all, only consider watching it if you have nothing better to do. But you'll probably want to pass on it. 4/10.

This movie is a clumsy mishmash of various ghost-story and suspense-thriller conventions, none of them fully realized and all of them rather irritating. The script was perfunctory. The acting, ditto. The scary FX were mostly laughable except for one exquisite seat-jumper moment that scared me even though I saw it coming a mile off. Now, explain to me someone why you would need ghosts, AND black magic, AND arcane ritual objects, AND Count Crapula CG boogeymen, AND psychic investigators, AND family curses, AND Irish superstitions, AND bowls of milk left out for the supernatural beings, AND possessed dollies, all in the same movie? With all that you would expect more than one good moment of horror, but this movie is lame, lame, lame.

This has got to be the worst movie I have ever seen. The part where they loose there daughter? with the poltergeist overtone rip off? just pushes it over the edge with stupidity. I watched it on showtime so it still had the cheese soft-core porn scenes in it. I have to say it made me laugh my ass off. The 80's 3d effects were very out of place. Included an invisible cat and a spinning vortex. Wow I wonder if the people who made this actually feel accomplished in life. The actress who plays the wife looks familiar but sucks anyhow. Her screaming could be used as a torture device in hell for more than retired Nazis. Anyways thank you showtime for the super crappy horror movie. I will always enjoy the time I watched the biggest waist of time and money I have ever seen.