(Streamed via Shudder)
I pretty much hate walk-through haunted houses because it’s so damned basic. Anybody with a mask can just leap out of nowhere, grab you, and make you jump. Personally, I much prefer the old school ride-through houses that feature cool animatronics and weird papier Mache monsters. At least with those, you can appreciate the craftsmanship that went into making them. Better that than being a target for some masked jerk with rage issues who probably wouldn’t have passed the background check the owners of the haunted house obviously didn’t bother to perform.
That basic bitch approach extends to this movie. Six annoying characters go to an out of the way haunted house. About halfway through, they see (or think they see) someone murdered by one of the masked “actors”. Next thing you know, they have to double back through the house, and this time, the scares are FOR REAL.
If the set-up was excruciating and laborious, the follow-through is painfully predictable every step of the way. The clichés range from The Final Girl who is troubled by a stalker boyfriend to the gang of killers who have purposefully vague backstories to the part where the villains trick the heroine into accidentally killing her best friend. We’ve seen all this before and done much better.
The kills are lame and forgettable too. Most revolve around Saw-style booby traps. The other deaths of the stab and slash variety are weak.
What’s worse is that it all just goes on far too long. The movie was already annoying, slow, and tedious to begin with. Then along comes the superfluous final reel to eat up another unnecessary ten minutes of your time. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, they play one of those irritating slowed-way-down cover versions of popular rock songs, in this case “Dragula”. These are normally reserved for trailers, so I don’t know what the heck it’s doing in the actual movie.
Producer Eli Roth should know better.
The directors also wrote the infinitely better A Quiet Place.
You are dead wrong, this film is awesome, this is better then the overrated Quiet Place. Didn't find the characters annoying at all.
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