Hell House LLC has a lot of pretty decent scares, but the actual story of the movie doesn't hold up.
This is a found footage movie that tells the story of some down-on-their-luck New Yorkers scouting out a new location for their Halloween haunt business in the made-up town of Abbadon. There, they buy an abandoned hotel with a dark history. Even though something is clearly wrong with the location, the crew pushes on towards opening night, where a terrible event claims many lives.
If that sounds like a spoiler, it's not, really. The movie opens laying all of this out, and it's more about the steps that happen along the way.
The movie excels at spooky atmosphere. Rather than get in your face with ghouls or excessive amounts of CGI, Hell House plays things subtle. It might be as simple as a shadow in the hallway, or things changing places when you look away for just a second, but it succeeds in being very unsettling without going overboard.
That being said, some of the production is a little sloppy, particularly in the sound design department. Being found footage, a lot of the sound in this movie has a very distinct style to it -- built-in microphones on handheld cameras. It's a little bit tinny, there's room echo, and so on. Which makes it SUPER OBVIOUS when they dub in new sounds during post production, because the dubbed sounds are ten times clearer than the microphone's source audio and definitely weren't present during filming. Not a deal breaker, but a minor annoyance.
The real problem is when Hell House tries to tell its story. The actors do okay, but this movie is jam packed full of horror movie logic where everybody involved spontaneously forgets about common sense. Being found footage, the camera is always rolling, but the condemning evidence is always either handwaved away for convenient reasons, or outright ignored entirely. These are ignorant characters doing dumb things, because if they were too smart and recognized the danger then we wouldn't have a movie to watch.
There's also not a lot in the way of character development. Real documentaries spend time helping us get to know the people involved, but that's glossed over here. We get little snippets of things early on, like how some people are known for arguing, or how the group had a bad time at their last haunt location in Queens. It largely does not matter, and there's zero sense of who these people were before they arrived at Abbadon. I never even knew most of their names.
Without getting in to spoiler territory, I also found the ending to be sort of a letdown. The movie is great with subtle scares, but the ending ends up being more confusing and underwhelming than scary. It's this weird half-step of showing you what happened, but only the least important parts.
I guess I did not hate my time with Hell House. It's fine, and mainly exists as a vehicle to deliver spooky moments. Just don't think about it too much harder than that.
