Monday, September 11, 2017

Dark House (2014)





Dark House is the story about a group of actors who take a job with a small horror attraction and discover the horror is real. Sounds like that urban legend about prop corpses in a dark ride being actual bodies, right? Great fodder for a horror movie...

Except that this is actually a ghost story and the manner in which our drama students meet their untimely ends is terribly unbelievable. You see, the angry ghost can't off the annoying teenagers herself so she turns the show's holograms against them. Yes, I said holograms. I was very tempted to put this review in the sci-fi category.

The characters are painfully stereotypical. Every one of the main disposition types are represented, so much so that only by having each of them wear a name tag that stated their assigned role in this personality stew would have made it more obvious.

The best character, in my opinion, was the ghost. I don't often see people play crazy characters who I would believe aren't actually playing with a full deck but this actress really pulled it off well. If I were a little kid I'd probably be having nightmares about her.

The story was okay but the attempt at throwing in a red herring was sloppy at best. Trying to illustrate how tech-saavy a ghost is, particularly one that presumably lived before the heyday of computer technology, did not seem to work out very well either.

What bothered me the most about this film was the almost total reliance on computer-generated effects. I understand that the murders were committed by holograms but CG bloodletting just looked like part of the show.

Visually, the film has enough power to keep a viewer interested even with the all-you-can-stomach CG buffet. It does follow the classic slasher formula where cheering as certain characters kick the bucket is appropriate but it isn't on par with the classics by way of suspense or believability.


Info on IMDB: Dark House




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