I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Dark House (2010) Straight To DVD


Jeffrey Combs can get me to watch a movie anytime. He's just that much fun to watch.


Now I'm not saying this is a terrific movie. It's made by Fangoria Films. Even those who don't like horror recognize the name Fangoria as a long-time horror magazine. Not necessarily a great maker of movies. Dark House has the typical horror film setup. You know the drill by now. Get a bunch of young people together and kill them off one by one.


This has some different ideas. It starts with a longish backstory about a woman who took in foster children (Child Services must have had a special because she had eight), went nuts and killed them. The house is considered haunted. Walston Rey (Jeffrey Combs) is a professional maker of spook houses and recruits the young people as actors in his newest creation, Dark House, which is of course at the haunted house.


A twist is the horrors of the terror attraction is a supposedly new technology that makes holograms look real and solid. I know nothing about computer component names, so I guess it would take a computer geek to say whether any of the equipment the person who developed the technology claimed to use was even real or not. Point being, changes in a person's mood (such as fear) or movement triggers the holograms, which jump out to make the most of the scare. Rooms are set up as different types of torture chambers (all holograms) to spread the scare around I guess.


Mr. Rey invites two persons from the press for a test showing. As the tour begins a virus enters the main computer (Being the 'ghost' of the woman who went nuts - that happens all the time you know. And you thought it was that porn you tried to download.) which takes over the systems and kills the computer operator. Now the holograms not only look solid, they are solid, and deadly (yeah I know that makes absolutely no sense but hey, they had to kill them off somehow).


In standard horror movie style people die one by one. Mr. Rey thinks it's the computer operator, but the surviving young person knows it to be the ghost of the mad woman - in an unnecessary plot complication she was in the house the day of the massacre, and the ghost wants her dead. Okay.


As she prepares to face the ghost after the death of Mr. Rey she finally remembers everything about the day she had repressed. Her therapist (How come in movies they're always screwing up?) had suggested her coming back to the house would help her heal. Nope. She lunges at the ghost with a knife. Duh.

Somehow the house, which had been completely sealed, is now open and police arrive (Why? Do you really even care?). They find the young woman with a bloody knife, obviously now totally bonkers and repeatedly stabbing the floor. Instead of finding the others the way she saw butchered, the police see that they have been stabbed or bludgeoned - and all the murder weapons have her fingerprints on them. So did she do it? Again, do we really even care?


While in a padded room she 'sees' a young couple enter the house (another dumb therapist idea - they really get bad press in movies) and the 'ghost' supposedly slaughters them, making the young woman scream and the movie end.


So this movie is not so good. Yeah, there's a little imagination to it, there's Jeffrey Combs, and there's some pretty good special effects. So I guess I would say if you have nothing better to do or watch this would suffice.