Dark House was the recent winner of Fangoria’s Frightfest which earned it a theatrical release. The movie is directed by Darin Scott and Written by Darin Scott and Kerry Douglas Dye.
In the film the main character Claire, played by Meghan Ory, revisits the house where a brutal massacre of children took place in an attempt to confront her demons. The house, once run by the evil Miss Darrode (Diane Salinger), is set to be opened as a haunted house by Mr. Walston(Jeffrey Combs) who is in need of actors. Not wanting to set foot in the house alone Claire convinces her acting class to take the job with her. They show up ready to spread fright, but unfortunately for them Miss Darrode has other evil plans.
The movie follows the basic haunted house scenario with the writers ideas thrown into mix. Despite the few actors with Claire, the house runs completely on computer generated holograms that are designed to be lifelike. The second floor is converted into the main parts of the haunted house and everything is run from a computer system set up in the cellar.
The characters of the movie have a somewhat cliche’ persona to them, the jock, easy girl, smart ass, etc. The actor isn’t bad but in my opinion it isn’t anything special. Theres scenes where the dialog is just a little bit too cheesy or it felt like instead of coming up with something original they just gave a generic line. Like there is a hologram as seen in the trailer of a man dressed as a clown and they conveniently name him “Evil Clown”. Also the scenes with Miss Darrode are sometimes just her screaming with her mouth in a weird position and it comes off to me as and unneeded element in an already creepy scene.
The special effects were also pretty good for a small budget film. I’m not sure what they were going for with some of the blood but it looked a little too CG at some points in the movie. There’s one scene with a decapitation and the blood shooting out looks ridiculously fake. It takes away from the scene a bit because it’s brighter than the walls and surrounding scenery and it’s hard to not focus on it. Another bad CG choice was the Matrix computer screen that turns red and has Miss Darrode inside of it spinning and screaming. It just seemed like too much to have all that going on the way it was.
The storyline was good and so was the ending. A lot of the Imdb users seemed to think that it was a cop out ending but I disagree. The ending was an interesting way to tie everything up and explained a lot of the questions I was asking myself while watching the movie. The only other Fangoria Frightfest movie I’ve seen is Pighunt, which is also great, but I can see why Dark House won.