The greatest movie ever!

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Dreadfully Boring

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Mr and Mrs plus their only child move out of the city to a big new house, well, not such a new house, and things start going wrong. Not that they'd been going right for some time, their marriage was if not on the rocks then in the doldrums, but what is happening now is very different. Is it the house, is it their daughter, is one or even both of them going mad? It doesn't take too long for the truth to come out, that it is the house, and that since 1957 there have been two horrendous tragedies there. That's the plus side. Alas, dream sequences that are indistinguishable from real life scenes, a fairly dull script, and almost no action worthy of the name make this very low budget film a tepid offering. All that and not even a soundtrack. There must be better ways to spend a Sunday night, like watching paint dry.

I don't know why, but the SyFy Channel runs very few haunted house movies while Lifetime occasionally runs these family dramas with vague paranormal ingredients and calls them horror thrillers. It doesn't really work. The ghosts aren't scary, and the drama is often unbelievably cookie-cutter routine. Probably based on the events that inspired "The Conjuring," "House of Darkness" is about a family that relocates to a remote house with paranormal activity. The parents have the anxiety of Jack and Wendy Torrance from "The Shining," and the daughter is a loose clone of Carol Ann from "Poltergeist," but the scares are nowhere close to "The Amityville Horror." There are a few shots of the local neighbors looking over nervously to suggest there's something wrong with the house, but these foreshadowing elements don't work because the house looks more like a small motel than a haunted house. One of the more ridiculous plot elements is the fact that the couple is keeping up with their marriage counselor in short video diaries that they keep making through the movie. What consists of the hauntings are the wife seeing signs of children in old Halloween episodes she thinks is her daughter, and the daughter and her cousin experimenting with toys rolling by themselves across the house. The father sees a few things happen, but his situation is not to believe in what's happening and instead lose his mind much like Jack Torrance in "The Shining." It's not really scary, nor is there anything done that truly creative. Almost everything in this movie from the psychic attacked by flies to the daughter who turns up in a sealed up room has already been done in other more successful horror movies. This is what happens when one tries to turn a familial drama into a horror movie without having a real understanding of how horror movies work. There's just nothing to really pull the audience in. The activity isn't scary, the plot is slow, the characters are boring and the script drags on uninterestingly as the viewer waits for something to happen. Even the attempt for a twist ending is left vague, not that the effort really matters by now. I give it 2 out of 5.

I've generally avoided Lifetime's forays into ghost stories and haunted-house tales, but last night they were offering a "world premiere" of a film called "House of Darkness" and I thought I'd give it a chance. It was directed by Patrick DeLuca from a script by … well, I don't know, because I missed the opening credits and IMDb.com's page on it doesn't yet list a writer, so I don't know either who to credit for the occasional felicitous touches in the script or blame for the sillinesses and outrageous devices, including an open-ended ending of a kind that about 20 or 30 years ago would have seemed innovative but now is annoyingly clichéd. It opens with a scene on Hallowe'en in 1957, in which two trick-or-treaters approach a house in a remote rural area of northern California, get invited in, the door closes — and suddenly we hear them scream. Then the time moves up to July 2015, and the house is occupied by a young couple from San Francisco, Brian (Gunner Wright) and Kelly (Sara Fletcher). They already have a daughter, Sarah (Mykayla Sohn), but Kelly wants another child — only Brian, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, is such a workaholic he's never home long enough for the two to have sex. Brian sells her on the idea of moving to the country by telling her they'll be more alone, there will be fewer urban-related distractions and therefore more time for the "adult nights" they need to complete the sex act and conceive already. Their marriage is already on the rocks — they've been seeing a marriage therapist in San Francisco (a heavy-set avuncular African-American woman, reflecting Lifetime's tendency to cast Blacks in the roles of all-wise authority figures trying to deter the white characters from doing the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all) but they won't be able to keep seeing her once they move hundreds of miles away, so she tells them to keep video journals by talking to their computers at night and gives Brian a yellow squeeze-ball with a smiley-face on it to squeeze whenever he gets stressed. One of the big issues in their marriage is that Kelly works as a massage therapist, and Brian is ferociously jealous that she'll get hot-looking male customers, lose control completely and thereby have sex with them.Director DeLuca gives us plenty of shots of Sarah with her eyes glaring at the camera and the other cast members, making us wonder if the unnamed writer(s) planned to pull the gimmick of having the whatsit that's haunting the house take possession of her and have her start knocking off the rest of the cast — the scenes with Sarah and her cousin Mason had elements of "The Turn of the Screw" and the later scenes with Sarah alone, casting all those burning glares, call to mind "The Bad Seed" — but at the end the gimmick turns out to be a pretty prosaic one. Through much of this movie I was counterpointing it with the old film I'd seen recently, Victor Halperin's "Supernatural" (1933), and thinking that "Supernatural" was an example of how to do a credible ghost story with a contemporary (for the time it was made) setting and "House of Darkness" was an example of how not to — that's being a little harsher on "House of Darkness" than it deserves, since at least it's well acted (especially by the leads) and much of it well staged by director DeLuca — though I could have done without the long time-lapse montages to get us from night to day where a classic-era director would have just cut from one to the other. I didn't actively dislike this movie but I didn't like it that much either!