DARK HOUSE [2009]

 DEATH LIVES HERE. 

One of that bunch of Fangoria Frightfest films they were making about a decade back, DARK HOUSE is fun and entertaining up to a point but isn't quite fun and entertaining enough to be a hoot and a holler.  14 years ago a little girl named Claire went into a spooky old house -- only to find a passel of murdered children and a madwoman (the murderer) shoving her hand into the kitchen sink's garbage disposal.  Claire passes out and we fast forward to the present and Claire has no idea what they hell happened to her in that house . . . only that she somehow survived.  The now adult Claire (Meghan Ory) is an acting student in college.  During an acting class, a nutty guy called Walston Rey (the nicely nutty Jeffrey Combs) barges in and announces that he's hiring actors to populate his Halloween Haunted House that's going to have a big media blitz of publicity for him.  A group of the acting students (including Claire) agree to do it (there's quite a wad of pay up for grabs); unfortunately Rey has bought the same murder house from which Claire survived 14 years earlier.  Claire must face her fears.  

Rey's Haunted House-a-palooza is complete with a high-tech control room and sensors placed all around the house which, when they pick up fear and excitement from the punters, materialize life-like holograms of a bunch of monstrous . . . .well, monsters.  Evil clowns, claw-fingered ghosts, mad butchers and the lot.  Unfortunately, there also happens to be a real malignant ghost in the house:  Janet Darrode (Diane Salinger) the murderer of all those kids.  And she's out to get some more victims.  And she's pretty good at getting them too as Janet takes control of the holograms and somehow makes them lethally corporeal.  So when the holograms attack now . . . they really kill you!

Now, this is a pretty neat idea for a body count horror movie.  And it's almost as fun and entertaining as it needs to be.  Jeffrey Combs and Diane Salinger are wonderful as always.  Jeffrey Combs is . . . well . . . .God.  And Diane Salinger was the Penguin's Mom (in BATMAN RETURNS) so . . . . yeah.  She's wonderfully malignant and unhinged.  And this is good because the "pretty models" that populate the rest of the cast are pretty forgettable with not much personality between them. 

Meghan Ory is pretty good as our "heroine" Claire but tends to go a little OTT in the crying scenes; but otherwise she's perfectly good here.  The haunted house is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overlit but still looks pretty good since it's technically not supposed to be a traditional haunted house but one that's gonna have holograms jumping out at you . . . so I suppose you gotta be able to see dem.  The CGI effects are . . . well, laughably low rent and look like they are from the early 1990's instead of 2009.  Sure, they're awful but that's all part of the fun, right?  I'm not talking about the monster holograms here, though, because they're all realized with practical effects, makeup and costumes.  I keep using that word "fun".  And fun is what this movie is (with a few sections that lag).  If only things had been allowed to get a little more bonkers, this would be a bad movie classic.