Spectre

Given that Roger Corman attached his name to this production, I had high hopes for this film. Corman directed many memorable low budget horror flicks in the 1960's. I particularly enjoyed his adaptations of Poe's stories such as `The House Of Usher,' and `The Pit And Pendulum' and `The Raven' which starred the late great Vincent Price. These films had solid acting, atmosphere, suspense, strong characterization, intriguing plot development and delivered some chilling moments. Sadly, `House Of The Damned,' for the most part, sacrifices these qualities in lieu of cheesy low budget special effects, gratuitous nudity and mindless gore topped with cliche fast edits and camera angles.

`House Of The Damned' starts off interestingly with some beautiful location shots in Ireland, but it's straight downhill from here. Unfortunately, instead of spending some time building atmosphere, creating characters we might care about, or building suspense - the director opts to begin running up the body count. After a brief introduction to the lead characters, a young couple and their daughter, the audience spends the balance of the film being bounced from one `spooky' event to another which, in this film, substitutes for coherent plot development. The lead characters are so ill conceived and are so badly acted - the audience doesn't care what happens to them. To make matters worse, the `spooky' events are either utterly cliché or unconvincing due to low tech - low budget special effects. The soundtrack has been lifted from `The Omen.' The plot, what little there is, borrows heavily from `Poltergeist' and `The Legend Of Hell House,' but lacks any of the qualities which made these films convincing.

If you interested in seeing well done haunted house flicks, I recommend you check out classics like `The Haunting (1963),' `The Innocents (1961) or look into Corman's early American International films and pass on `House Of The Damned' unless you're masochistic or mindless.

3 ½ out of 10.

Rob Rheubottom

Wpg, MB. Canada

This movie is a clumsy mishmash of various ghost-story and suspense-thriller conventions, none of them fully realized and all of them rather irritating. The script was perfunctory. The acting, ditto. The scary FX were mostly laughable except for one exquisite seat-jumper moment that scared me even though I saw it coming a mile off. Now, explain to me someone why you would need ghosts, AND black magic, AND arcane ritual objects, AND Count Crapula CG boogeymen, AND psychic investigators, AND family curses, AND Irish superstitions, AND bowls of milk left out for the supernatural beings, AND possessed dollies, all in the same movie? With all that you would expect more than one good moment of horror, but this movie is lame, lame, lame.

New Year's Day. The day after consuming a few too many vodka martinis and Cosmopolitans mixed with a bunch of bubbly at midnight, my wife and I discovered the local cable company is offering up the digital specialty channels for free for the month of January. We had a choice - do we make use of the freebie channels or do we start watching the eight seasons of X-Files on DVD that we received from our daughter for Christmas?

We elected for the digital freebie since the DVDs are going nowhere and we need something like ten twelve-hour days to watch all the X-Files beginning to end. The Drive-In channel was offering a horror classic three movie marathon: Asylum (1972), House of the Damned (1996) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). Asylum is well-reviewed here and the Pit and the Pendulum was on too late for us to watch which meant we could really only be properly critical for House of the Damned.

To be honest, we tried to be serious about the movie since its stars have reasonably good acting credentials - Greg Evigan (William Shatner's over-written Tekwars) and Alexandra Paul (the only Baywatch babe who could act although she has the body of a ten-year-old boy). Unfortunately, we soon dissolved to giggles, under the influence of a little hair-of-the-dog, as we each shouted out the names of movies from which this dog borrowed its scenes: Poltergeist, The Shining, Hell House, House On Haunted Hill, Ghost Busters!

The acting, especially by Evigan's real-life daughter, wasn't too bad considering the silly script they had to work with. The CGI, for 1996, was hilarious - at its worst point in the final scene when it should have been the most horrific it was so bad my wife and I dissolved in laughter.

Overall: Acting 4/5, Script 2/5, SFX 0/5

"House of the Damned" (also known as "Spectre") is one of your low budget haunted house horror flicks, filled with mediocre performances and cheap effects. It is about a family that inherits an old Irish mansion, and after moving in begin to experience strange phenomenon and ghostly apparitions, including the ghost of a young girl who was murdered and buried within a wall in the mansion's basement. The couple's young daughter is then whisked away into some other dimension and they seek help from a group of paranormal investigators for help.

The ideas this film borrowed from the 1982 haunted house film "Poltergeist" are obvious. I will say that this movie does have some slightly creepy sequences, but it is sometimes very, very boring. The acting here is nothing special, the mood is alright, the score (which was mostly this dramatic Irish opera music) was somewhat annoying, and the CGI special effects are really horrible. I mean, it was 1996, you would think they could have done a little better than they did. The ending where the house was on fire was the poorest special effect I've seen, very very cheap. But hey, this was a cheap movie.

Also, the translucent monster wolf thing that their daughter sees looks horribly fake. And what was it's significance in the film anyway? What the heck does a wolf-monster have to do with a haunted house? The special effects in here are what really ruined this movie. The acting was pretty bad too. I usually enjoy many low budget horror films, but not this one. "House of the Damned" is nothing special at all, only consider watching it if you have nothing better to do. But you'll probably want to pass on it. 4/10.

Strange things happen to Americans Will (Greg Evigan), Maura (Alexandra Paul) and their young daughter Aubrey (Briana Evigan, Greg's real life daughter) when they move into a large, newly inherited house in Ireland. Crusty corpses are found in the cellar, a turkey squirts blood, furniture moves and the ghosts of a dead child and a cackling old lady show up to scare the little girl. Paranormal investigators are eventually called in to banish the evil spirits, but Maura becomes possessed anyway and chases everyone around with a meat cleaver.

This film is full of cliches, but there's a standout performance from Alexandra Paul... too bad it doesn't belong in this movie (nor any other I can think of off hand)! She can barely keep a straight face and her over-emoting and hysterical screaming tantrums are a joy to behold. In any case, she's a lot more interesting to watch than anything else in this movie.

Score: 3 out of 10