The Haunted House on Kirby Road

Six young friends watch a video of a haunted house on the internet. One of them recognizes the person in the video. They decide to check out the haunted house on Kirby Road.

It's a low budget Canadian indie horror. The setup is fine if rather plain. The condom scene has one hilarious laugh. It's a good start but it stagnates upon arriving at the house. It takes awhile for the horror to start. In fact, it's well into the second half. The actors are ready to scream but the house is not up to the challenge. It's an indie horror that fails to be scary.

I thought the first half of The Haunted House On Kirby Road was all right, with a couple good laughs and not much (or any) horror at that point. The acting wasn't bad either, not spectacular but not annoying either. And then came the second part. The part that is supposed to be the horror side of the movie. Now, that was pretty lame, if not awful at some point. The acting changed completely from being okay to bad. The horror scenes, if you can call them like that, are very badly done, quite the opposite of the first half of the movie where I thought the cinematography was more than decent. And even if you would like to pass the horror scenes as humor it didn't work at all, it was just bad. The movie ratings dropped at that point. Before the 'horror' I would have rate it a six but now a three is more than fair enough.

Wow. That was awful.Wow. That was awful. Wow. That was awful. Wow. That was awful. Wow. That was awful. Wow. That was awful.

This movie holds it together just enough to eke out a second star and nothing more. Not scary, not funny, not much of anything. Plus the final girl is such a stick in the mud that you end up rooting for the ghost.

The first say twenty minutes weren't that bad at all. Somehow the director succeeded in picturing the boredom of blasé teens very well, like "chilling" together without a clue how to fill the time or what to talk about. See for instance how they morosely hung in their seats in the haunted house, before the things got rough. There's also a short but brilliant scene when they stop at a gas-station to buy condoms, and the guy at the counter insists on giving an educational demonstration, really hilarious.

But this movie set out to be a horror flick, and here it failed completely. The premise was far fetched to begin with (but hey, what horror-premise isn't?!), and the subsequent goings-on were ludicrous and totally unscary, not even amusing in a campy sort of way.

In short, a superfluous wannabe horrorflick, with in a few scenes the shimmering of real cinematographic potential.