JediStormbreaker

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.

The movie loses so much of what made the book work. Multiple issues arise solely because of changes to the plot and characters. The book worked a bit like clockwork, with pieces fitting neatly together ticking away toward the climax. The movie just has things happen with no internal logic.

While I can understand in principle the consolidation of characters, the movie never gets any new traction from the changes. New characters similarly add nothing to the events, merely changing how things play out without any real impact on the action.

I really don't know what they were thinking. This could have been a great film, instead it was just middling.

While I give the film props for an interesting and unique creature design, it can't really elevate a movie that just feels mediocre.

The film presents itself as something of a metaphor for grief, but it ultimately feels extremely toned down and toothless. Jump scares aside, the movie does very little to ratchet up its tension, making its handful of tense moments feel a bit like islands in a sea of "get on with it".

The performances are fine, but ultimately the film never lets the characters really get to dig into their own trauma and depression in a way that might give the film some much needed depth. It ends of feeling as if someone wanted to make the Babadook, but in the style of films like House on Haunted Hill or Thirteen Ghosts.

It's a pleasant enough watch, but you'll forget it in a week.