Chain Reaction

Loads of gore, decent effects and unintentionally funny characters made this film just makes it bearable. I had to watch this in 3 different sittings and maybe that's the best way to see it without becoming tired of the story.

There are events that set off a chain reaction and sets a series of events into motion.

House of Blood (called Chain Reaction on the IMDb) is really a pretty terrible movie in many respects. Christopher Kriesa is not that bad an actor, but the rest of the cast is pretty bad (except for what is basically a cameo from Jurgen Prochnow). I think the movie was shot in Germany. The gore effects are pretty bloody for the most part and some are pretty good.

Others are not, especially the make-up work. We're left in the end with a lot of important unanswered questions. The whole "chain reaction" aspect and other parts of the writing are pretty poor.

House of Blood is pretty poor and I'd only suggest a rental if you want something to make fun of or are that desperate for gore effects (lots of the red stuff flows). Thou renteth at thine own peril!

While driving on a lonely road a bus with dangerous inmates from Seattle, the driver crashes on a car driven by Dr. Douglas Madsen (Christopher Kriesa) and the three prisoners leaded by Arthur Palmer (Simon Newby) escape and execute the security guards. However, Arthur's brother Spence (Luca Maric) is shot, and the criminals decide to abduct Dr. Douglas to take care of Spence and walk to North in the direction of the Canadian border. They find an old cabin in the middle of the woods inhabited by a weird family that speaks ancient English and advises the group to leave the place while they can. The strangers transform in flesh-eater monsters and kill the criminals, but the local Alice (Martina Ittenbach) spares Dr. Douglas and saves his life. He is found by the police and he is interrogated by a police officer (Jürgen Prochnow) that does not believe on his words and he is sent to the prison in Seattle. While in a bus with dangerous inmates, the bus crashes on a car and the story repeats like in a déjà vu for Dr. Douglas and the criminals.

"House of Blood" is an extremely violent and gore, with scary and gruesome special effects. Unfortunately the acting is uneven, with good but also awful performances. The screenplay and the story are flawed, since what could be the possibility of another identical accident in the same lonely road in the same circumstances? But there are good points in the story and with improvements and better actors, this movie would have a great potential. I can not say that I hated or that this movie is totally bad, but the story indeed deserved improvements. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Casa de Sangue" ("House of Blood")

A very professional movie from the former "ultra-gore" auteur (Premutos ,The burning moon)Olaf Ittenbach. Chain Reaction (aka House of Blood) is a professional, good looking 35 mm film, with car crashing, great makeup and gore FX but it lacks in entertainment value. I mean, its very boring and confusing. The plot is very hard to follow and the action scenes comes only in bits (when they come are cool with gore and blood, but its a very talkie movie, and the dialogs sucks. Premutos was a great low budget movie. Then Ittembach entered more mainstream. The "fromdusktilldawnesque" Legion of the Dead was pretty cool and entertaining, but stuff like this or Riverplay make me think if i will watch a new Ittembach movie. 4/10 for the good productions values only.

Olaf is Germany's sfx-wonder. And he is an amateur in making movies. He started with video-home-movie-horror-events with incredible sfx which looks like the best days of Lucio Fulcio or the Hellraiser movies. But script, directing actors and dialogs are not his profession. I know that he is thinking that directing is his profession, but that is not true...look his movies. This movie is also a small-big-budget-amateur-movie with on a high trash-level and a lot of unmeant comedy. But there is a lot of splatter and gore sfx on a high level. Jürgen Prochnow has a small part in this movie and the only reason for it is, that he want to give this movie a chance because of his name. The story and setting is always the same in a Ittenbach movie: the hell, the dead, maniacs, zombies, rednecks and some stupid heroes with some lame Tarantiono-dialogs.

When the movie started, I was pleasantly surprised about some rather nice camera work. This pleasure lasted exactly until one of the actors started to speak.

This movie proves that basic technical skills do not make good directing: Apart from moving the camera in the right way, a director also has to make decisions concerning things that do or don't work. Ittenbach's movie fails miserably in the attempt to get some acting out of the amateur cast.

I sometimes enjoy amateur actors, but here we have a disastrous collision between the lack of acting skills and the inane things the poor people are supposed to say. The plot revolves around some convicts stranded in a forest hut with a family that obviously lived secluded from civilization for some centuries. When these people speak, they use what writers Ittenbach and Thomas Reitmair assume to be an ancient English dialect. This idea may have looked nice on paper, but the result is absolutely hilarious. Because the writers believe that old English simply consists of attaching a "th" to every verb, everybody is phonetically challenged and has to speak very slowly. When the doctor asks the protagonist girl (horrifically played by Ittenbach's wife Martina) whether she has some hot water, her unwieldy reply is "Aye, haveth I". (For the reader: What do you think is the translation of "no" into old English? Right: "Nay, haveth I not".) Almost as funny as this is the grandiose overacting by Dan van Husen, who tries to play the chief convict. If somebody told him that he is not Anthony Hopkins, would he believe it? Inexplicably, Jürgen Prochnow also has a small part, unfortunately a talking role. He's as terrible as in all of his English speaking roles. I thought his career had hit rock bottom when he appeared in "House of the Dead", but it's strange how things can always get worse.

The only thing that Ittenbach is known to do really well is over-the-top splatter and gore effects. The movie is rather tame in this respect, even compared to Ittenbach's work in Uwe Boll's "BloodRayne" (where the two formed an unholy alliance). The effects did a lot to make this the first of Boll's movies that was comparatively bearable. As a director, however, Olaf Ittenbach is a much more terrible than Boll and would deserve an appropriate level of notoriety.