Sharni Vinson leads a team of kidnappers to snatch a young
woman from her well-to-do family. They
kidnap her and take her to a dilapidated building where they begin making their
ransom demands. While doing so, the
kidnappers slowly come to realize there is something different about their
captive. She seems to know their darkest
secrets and later exhibits the power to project disturbing visions of their
dead loved ones into their minds.
The movie starts off with a bang. The opening scenes of the kidnappers planning
their crime run like clockwork, thanks to a strong performance by Vinson. The strong set-up eventually gives way to
repetitive scenes of characters seeing hallucinations of dead
bodies/ghosts/zombies accompanied by high-pitched screaming, which is
unfortunate.
Ultimately, the movie plays with the audience’s expectations
a bit too much. They endlessly tease the
kidnapped girl’s big secret, and once they finally reveal it, it’s pretty lame. I won’t spoil it for you (although its
alternate title does a good job of doing that), but I will say if they had just
come out and said what was going on a half-hour earlier, the film had a much
better potential of being fun. As it is,
the constant teasing wears on your patience.
It doesn’t help that the long flashback sequence that
explains everything is so damned dull.
This scene is filled with a lot of stupid “rules” concerning the girl’s
condition that have to be laboriously explained to the audience by the characters.
Sometimes, the cinematography is so dark
that it makes some scenes hard to make out, which is another major debit.
For all its faults, the zombies do have a griminess about
them that makes them feel like they came out of a Lucio Fulci movie. That’s about the best thing I can say about
them. Too bad director Alastair Orr couldn’t
think of a better way to use them more effectively.
I liked Vinson in You’re Next, and she does a fine job
here. In fact, she’s the only one in the
whole movie with any kind of screen presence.
Whenever she isn’t front and center, House on Willow Street really
falters.
AKA: Demon Girl. AKA:
Demon House on Willow Street. AKA: From a House on Willow Street.
No comments:
Post a Comment