Death House

I don't know what's worse... the fact that this movie is an absolute mess or that I wanted to love it and it left me with blue balls. The lighting is awful, the editing was done by a blind and deaf person, and the ending makes zero sense. The only reason it got as many stars as it did was because they did manage to corral a lot of horror legends into one place.

I really wanted to like this one, being a fan of all the horror legends it contained. It started off like it had a plot, but then the director said "Nevermind, I'll just do whatever.", and the movie collapsed in on itself.

I saw the Death House Twitter account begging for people to give positive reviews for the movie, as according to them, the 'Trolls' have had a go at it. So i will give this an honest constructive. It is true amateur reviewers will often either give a movie an extreme rating, either 1 or a 10 . Neither of which is particularly helpful . So i'll go through the positives and negatives of what i can contribute to the conversation .

What worked?

• It is fun to spot all the plethora of horror and B-movie actors , some of which only have a brief walk on performance.
• There is one truly stand out scene , where there is a bunch of skinless zombie like creatures, that does look really impressive effects wise.
• Kane Hodder is pretty good in this

What didn't work

• Too concerned with setting up a sequel with Tony Todd's character
• The cinematography is very poor. It's far too dark and under lit, making it impossible to see what is going on sometimes. I appreciate it's taking place in an underground prison, but you have to write your script and film it so people can see what is going on. Besides, no one is watching this for realism.
• With the exception of the scene mentioned above. The effects are very poor. Horrible green scree, poor cgi after effects and even other practical effects look bad
• The acting isn't good , our two lead protagonists are wooden, and even veteran actors like Dee Wallace turn in a poor performance. It seem like the director has done one take, and just accepted it.
• The biggest issue is the story and script . It is all over the place , it simply doesn't make a lick of sense from beginning to end . Right from the start where it's never fully explained who and why our two lead characters are and what they are doing there at the beginning of the movie, right up until the end with the quite frankly embarrassing 'Five evils ' scene. The narrative structure is so poor, confusing and convoluted

Ultimately this movie should have invested it's finances behind the camera rather than being so concerned with all the cameos , which ends up being really a waste of the actors time .

A real waste of an opportunity and concept . Although i don't like this typical internet behavior of it's either a 1 or a 10 . I think it's equally deplorable for a film company to essentially coerce the weak minded to giving overly favorable reviews.

Words fail me...

I'm a huge horror fan and love low budget, indie stuff just as much as mainstream movies but there is simply nothing positive to say about this catastrophic mess.

The premise is so simple and soooo enticing but the end result is just an incoherent disaster. How could ANYONE consider this to be a finished product?

It makes no sense, characters drift in and out, scenes appear out of sequence, nothing is ever explained ... it's just a cluster of epic proportions.

The actors themselves must have watched the final cut and wondered how the hell this came together.

I am horrified that I spent money on the DVD and you can be certain it's going straight into the bin now.

When I heard of this movie, I was very excited due the movie having all of my favorite horror movie icons and the trailer made the movie look better than it actually was. The script (IMO) did not explain any of the back stories of the characters, the script seemed to be a bland story and the story seemed to jump around a lot and was seemed to be written by a bored tenth grader. The graphic nature of the horror (Especially the half alive skeleton people in the cooler was a cool affect and the scream was very unnerving and probably the best part of the movie. I wish they did a back ground story on the half alive people.) is why I am scoring this a three. Without the graphic parts I would have given this a one. This movie would be ok for a time waster but nothing more. The crew could have done so much more with the story but did not. I think this should have been a mini-series instead of a movie where time could have been given for the background of the characters.