Friday, October 31, 2014

The Houses October Built


(2014)
* 1/2

In this found footage film, five friends go on a road trip across Texas to try and find an extreme haunted house experience, or "haunt" as they've termed them.  What they end up finding is a lot of hillbilly types who take punish them for their haunted house fetish. 

The Blair Witch Project doomed us to decades of found footage horror films.  Some are good (Rec, Quarantine, and apparently The Taking of Deborah Logan), most are bad.  And just when you think it's starting to wane, Paranormal Activity comes along and dooms us to more of these movies.  I should know to stay away from these, but I love haunted houses, and the preview looked cool.  Most of this movie is a boring road trip with improvised dialogue.  There are 20 minutes at the end where, having finally found the "extreme haunt", things actually get cool, and kind of scary.  But then, following the Blair Witch formula, the anti-climactic ending puts the kybosh on any kind of cool scary story that had been developing.  It gets 1 1/2 stars for those 20 minutes when there was still potential, and the freaky porcelain girl above, who stole every scene she was in.  They should have just made a real movie about her. 

4 comments:

Octopunk said...

Aw, she ain't scary! Just break her face!

Your outlook on the Found Footage phenomenon echoes my own grumpy old man feelings about it. In other words I loved your review!

Catfreeek said...

Sounds dreadful.

AC said...

Yikes.

DKC said...

JPX put the trailer up for this before H-thon, didn't he? I remember because I was annoyed by the phrase "extreme haunt." And I'm still annoyed by it!

Malevolent

 2018  ***1/2 It's 1986 for some reason, and a team of paranormal investigators are making a big name for themselves all over Scotland. ...