Today's Feature: House Of Fears (2007)
Where do I start with House Of Fears? How do I motivate myself to somehow discuss this movie? It's a movie about a sextet of dumb young people who sneak into a haunted house that is home to an ancient cursed idol that manifests their darkest fears and dispatches them one by one. That's pretty much it. These blundering fools just get picked off by their deepest, darkest fears in a big old spook house, and it's just excruciating to watch. Not because the special effects are so realistic, or because the narrative so expertly builds tension that simply gazing at the screen becomes almost unbearable after a certain point. No, House Of Fears is an excruciating experience because it's just so incredibly boring.
The actors are all just shrieking buffoons with no real personalities to speak of, and the characters they're playing have no strong defining traits or distinctions. I honestly can't even remember any of their names, and I just finished watching the damned movie maybe ten minutes before I started writing. Two of these dweebs are step-sisters and they hate each other for no reason, one of them is a bland, generic hero type, one of them is a merry prankster who gets his jollies wearing gas masks and getting kneed in the groin, one of them hates everything and everyone, and the last girl is also there, because otherwise there wouldn't be six people in the spook house, and there need to be six people in the spook house because the script demands that there be six people in the spook house.
Their fears are all very standard and lame: clowns, scarecrows, getting eviscerated by mannequins in boiler suits, suffocating via magic sand conjured by a papier-mâché mummy, getting struck by lightning in the crotch, and being bludgeoned to death by a hammer-wielding engineer from Prometheus. None of this is at all entertaining to watch. At less than ninety minutes in length, this movie shouldn't feel like a three-hour-long endurance test. By the time I finally reached the startling climax, featuring our two final girl step-sisters lamely fending off some staggering jackass in an ill-fitting scarecrow costume for nearly fifteen minutes, I was so fucking bored I nearly threw in the towel.
How could this movie be so bad? Every single time one of the characters is killed, or somebody touches something, or the editor just gets bored, the movie is momentarily interrupted by a quick-cut montage of gleaming knife-blades, reaching hands, and dripping blood, accompanied by endless repetition of that standard "slicing" sound effect you've heard ten million times before if you've watched more than three horror movies made after 1993. I suppose this jump scare bullshit is supposed to be startling, but it's just irritating, and it gets more irritating the more the movie relies on this ridiculous tactic, and it becomes a more common occurrence as the dwindling cast of victims wanders deeper into the haunted confines of the titular House of Fears.
You know a filmmaker has nothing worthwhile to offer when they rely on such a tired cliché to frighten their audience, and frankly it's insulting. Is it impossible to ask these people to try just a little bit harder when they make a horror movie? I know it's so easy to just keep going back to the old standards instead of attempting innovation, but please just make some small effort to mix things up a bit. The jokers who made House Of Fears clearly didn't feel like expending any real effort at any point during this film's development, production, or post-production, and that lack of effort is plastered all over every moment of the final product.
In fact the only interesting thing I can say about this movie is that Supernatural star Jared Padalecki makes a brief, silent cameo during a party scene early on in the movie. He's just there for five seconds, doing and saying nothing of note, and it's easily the most entertaining aspect of this utter misfire of a horror film. I don't know why he pops up in this movie, and I don't want to know. It doesn't matter; it simply is. I've got nothing else to say about House Of Fears, so I'm going to just stop.
I noticed there was a movie called Poseidon Rex on Hulu while browsing through the recommendations underneath this movie, so I guess I'm going to watch that tomorrow. I don't know what the fuck it is or what it's about, but the title alone makes it better than House Of Fears, so I join me tomorrow as we journey into the ocean depths in search of something called a Poseidon Rex!
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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