Hell House LLC: Lineage

I'm honestly upset I paid to see this. It isn't even a complete movie. Despite being nearly two hours long, there's zero resolution. It's a bait ending that sets up for a conclusion, a conclusion I'm not at all looking forward to after this film.

There are a couple of creepy moments, but as far as standout scares, it's mostly been there, done that. All the cliches are present, including terrible writing and some equally bad acting. One scene in particular is so poorly written and pointless that I couldn't believe it made it past the cutting room floor. The dialogue was so bad at times, I wouldn't at all be surprised if I was told it was written by ChatGPT.

As a fan of these films, I'm really disappointed. I was lead to believe this would be the final film in the franchise, only to end with more questions than answers and a film that's little more than a montage of familiar scares and hanging plot threads.

Cognetti decided to switch from found footage to, in his own words, "real" filmmaking. That's a slap in the face to the genre and gave me a bad taste in my mouth. Still, I'm a huge HH fan so I obviously had to see what he'd come up with. My expectations were low but this was just a disaster. It wasn't remotely scary. The story promised to answer some questions, and it did..it just gave boring and nonsensical ones. My girlfriend had no idea what was going on, and said it was one of the least scary movies I've dragged to her to. I knew what was going on, and just found it to be a mess. It's a truly terrible way to end a great franchise, and it's all due to Cognetti's arrogance. He aban what got him here in the first place, and the reviews speak for themselves (the real reviews..not the 8-10's that are clearly fake). If you see a great review, check the user's review history. If this is the only movie they've ever reviewed, it's clearly someone who has something to gain. There's a lot of that on this website, unfortunately. This film is getting roasted on Reddit, Rotten, and YouTube. Don't be fooled. To Cognetti, I'm sure you're reading these reviews. Do the right thing and finish this franchise with a worthy ending. Go back to the basics and what got you here. You created a great franchise, but you were in way over your head here.

I love the Hell House LLC movies. The original is probably my favorite found footage movie. While I enjoyed the second, I thought the third felt rushed and underwhelming, but Carmichael Manor was a great return to form, and the best since the original.

That's part of what makes the newest installment so incredibly disappointing.

Billed as the final installment in the series, Lineage is incredibly heavy on lore and info dumps, but none of that new information ever gets paid off in any way. The movie introduces a new piece of backstory to try to tie together deaths that didn't need tied together, but then never uses it to resolve the movie's plot or the greater story in general, instead cutting to the credits right when the final missing puzzle piece is about to be revealed.

Structurally, it feels like a film without a third act, which makes it feel overly long despite only being about an hour and forty-five minutes long. Our main protagonist's fear ramps up, but in place of a resolution, she only just begins to start putting puzzle pieces together. Meanwhile what the filmmakers seem to regard as the films third act is spent on side characters attempting to resolve the plot with zero involvement from the main character, while the main characater has a conversation with a new character who we don't have an attachment to and who doesn't expand our understanding of what's going on.

A location teased five minutes into the movie, returns in the last few minutes, but is never explained and ultimately has no real significance to the story other than a name drop to a character from earlier films. A minor character from prior films is revealed to be more involved than we knew, but there's no pay off too it. And there's a build up to a reveal that is implied to be incredibly important... that just never comes.

Honestly, it felt like everyone in the theater was sitting through the credits to see if there was a "to be continued" tag at the end, but it never came.

Overall this feels like an incredible misstep for what has generally been an incredibly solid series of films. I honestly cannot fathom how it was decided that this was how they were going to wrap up the story (by not wrapping up the story).

As a side note: I understand that the clown from the first film has become the series icon, but he felt incredibly overused here. Aside from an initial scene where he was used super effectively through traditional means of never showing him move, his regular movement throughout the rest of the movie combined with the fact that every scene was well lit, just removed any hint of terror from him. He stopped being creepy and just became a guy in a costume.

If there is a Hell House LLC movie made after this one, I might change my tune about the quality of this film. Judging it as the final entry in the series, however, it is probably one of the worst endings to a horror franchise I've ever seen. Imagine if the Halloween franchise ended at Revenge or Curse, and even then that's being generous because those movies each had an actual climax point in their stories. This movie not only ends 2/3 of the way into its story, it ends at the point where the movie was starting to actually get interesting. Regardless of the negative feedback that this movie has gotten from me and others, I sincerely hope that Stephen Cognetti makes another movie to at least end the series on a less confusing note. Leaving the entire series on a cliffhanger is the most depressing outcome for the Hell House fans anticipating this release. As a standalone, I would probably rate it close to a 7/10, but judging it as the final entry unfortunately lowers it down to a 4/10.

I'm not even sure what I watched. This was honestly one of the worst movies I've seen in years. Everything from the story, to the acting, to the production was just awful. There is no way this should have even been released in theaters. I feel like I was robbed by paying for this.

I was a huge fan of this series (mainly parts 1 and 4), and I was excited for this installment. I knew it wouldn't be found footage style going into it but I still gave it a chance. I wish I hadn't. It was around 2 hours of flashbacks, and the main character dreaming, crying and screaming non-stop. Don't even get me started on the priest and the other main female character. Their acting was atrocious. I've seen better acting in high school plays.

I had such high hopes for this movie, and it was on my list of most anticipated movies of the summer. The worst part is that they said this was the final movie in the series, but it obviously isn't. I mean it likely will be, because of the negative reaction it is gettin,g which sucks because we won't ever get to see a true conclusion.