8213: Gacy House

What a waste of a perfectly chilling premise. 8213: Gacy House sells itself as "Paranormal Activity in America's most infamous crawlspace," but delivers ninety minutes of night-vision yawns, Walmart-grade jump scares and improv so wooden you can almost hear the termites chewing. For an hour you get six nobodies bickering over who moved the EMF meter while the camera wobbles like a toddler on espresso. Then the Big Scary Shadow turns up, reminds you of that screensaver from 1998, and the cast forgets how doors work. Credits roll, you're already scrolling your phone. Skip it. Stream the original Paranormal Activity (again) or google a true-crime podcast-either option is scarier, faster and won't kill your brain cells.

The acting is so so poor, it's totally laughable. I mean laughable. Local am dram is better. Or a child's nativity play.

I fell asleep for 15 minutes and woke up and was still bored.

I can't even give this a proper review as it was so terrible. Laughable, not scary, complete rip off of Paranormal activity, Blair witch etc...

The opening set up is supposed to entice and creep out the viewer, but within ten minutes I was already knowing exactly what would happen and which character had the stereotypical traits.

With one female getting injured, there is a very obvious and poor attempt to get some boobs in. Soft porn for no reason, a close up of a breast. Why? Are you kidding.

Sex, in a house later on? Really? Are you sure when you are supposed to be holding an experiment to find ghosts? Sure, why not, the perfect time to have sex. IN A HOUSE WHERE THE BIGGEST SERIAL KILLER KILLED PEOPLE! HA. That's the other thing, this house was a new house on the grounds where gacy murdered people, so the original house has gone, yet throughout, the main guy kept saying it's in this basement they were found. Err, no, the house has gone.

The said main guy also, as a ghost hunter, kept on getting freaked out and scared and saying what the f was that?! Oh my god! Dude, you are supposed to be leading this event.

Total utter gash

Why, oh, why did I not read any reviews before carelessly putting this into my rental queue?? Please do yourselves a service and don't make the same mistake I did. This isn't even worth a chuckle.

Apparently this is, in fact, "Paranormal Entity 2." I didn't see the first one; to read about it, we're led to believe it's infinitely duller and more derivative of "Paranormal Activity" and others of that ilk than we could've possibly imagined. I believe it. And wouldn't you know it? The opening screen tells us that this is "found footage" on the body of a victim, and "it has been edited into a narrative" to tell us what happened and why there's only a videotape left. Even the font is the same as "PA" and "PA2." The time stamps. Ev-er-y-thing.

The plot is more or less already outlined in the basic summary here. A bunch of "researchers"/ghost hunters decide to spend a night at 8213 Summerdale, which used to be where John Wayne Gacy's house stood. That house was torn down after 26 bodies were found in his basement, but apparently someone built a new house on the lot once Gacy had been executed. Now it's supposedly a hot spot for all sorts of paranormal shenanigans, so naturally a crack team of pseudo-scientists, cameramen and pretty blonde college students feel compelled to go there in hopes of communicating with Gacy's spirit.

There's really not much else I can say, plot-wise. If you've ever seen an episode of "Most Haunted" or "Paranormal State" on TV - or if you've so much as seen a commercial for them - you already know what happens. Things go bump in the night, everyone thinks one member of the team must be making those noises just to freak the others out, then something else happens (lights flicker! doors open and close by themselves! they check the camera footage!) which convinces everyone... Etcetera. For 85 long minutes. There's no gore to speak of; there are no legitimate scares whatsoever. There are night vision cameras in empty rooms. There's a medium-type to bless the house and ask that they be kept safe while they attempt to chat up ol' John. (They even bring in a "pure, white t-shirt" belonging to an adolescent boy to try to tempt Gacy's spirit out of hiding. Yes. Really.) The few "special effects" at the "climax" are beyond lame. There is a lot of hysterical running around because someone saw a shadow, or the fireplace made a banging sound. For eighty. five. minutes.

I am all for a low-budget, clever little popcorn horror film. I'm not a horror snob. I don't need art-house subtitles or buckets of blood or a high-concept twist ending or a "Hostel"-esque torture theme to be scared. What I DO need is a character who's even remotely interesting, or something that doesn't look like it would've failed as a high school drama project. This couldn't pass the muster. ANY muster.

I bet you can guess the ending. You've seen it dozens of times before, but done far better. Really and truly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Take my word for it: if you spend one minute guessing how it all turns out, and the other 84 minutes doing anything BUT watching this...thing...you'll be a much less resentful person for it. Can you tell I'm bitter? I have nobody to blame but myself! But if I save JUST ONE of you from wasting those precious minutes... Nah, I'll still be ticked off.

...Because everything else is a waste of time. Apparently this is a sequel to Paranormal Entity, which I also disliked, but you'd not really think so as it has little in common with that. Everything just looked very slipshod visually, the camera work lacked focus, the effects while not the worst for the Asylum are still poor and somewhat half-baked and sometimes the lighting is so dimly lit. The dialogue is trite and repetitive, adding little if anything to the atmosphere, while I didn't care at all for the characters, they were annoying and you don't learn enough about them. The story did not engage in any way, the first half of Gacy House is so low-key and dull that you don't feel any tension or horror and you even question whether there is a story. The acting is stiff and phoned in in most cases. In fact, the one bright spot of Gacy House is the last fifteen minutes, while highly implausible it does have one or two good scares. All in all, a terrible movie on all levels apart from the end. 2/10 Bethany Cox

8213: Gacy House is what the back of the movie case says it is; no hidden perks. You are told from the very start that the movie is made in narrative form, so if you aren't a fan of that sort of movies, then you will already dislike this one (in my opinion). I know a lot of the reviews here say how crappy this film is, and the ratings on IMDb show that, but I rated on a different factor. In my opinion, this movie was made really well, as in: even though it switches camera angles a million times (from hand-held to stationary), it looks very clean and smooth. I've seen many movies where the story line was superb but the camera was crap - for this film, it is completely opposite. Now having said that, it was still a decent movie, and if watched under the right mindset / conditions, you will likely find some sort of enjoyment out of it. Don't watch it expecting it to be the best film you've ever seen, but likewise, don't watch it already thinking you will hate it. Go in with an open mind and unbiased eyes, and just take it for what it is.