Monday, May 11, 2015

The Houses October Built - Extreme Screams

The Houses October Built
2014
Directed by Bobby Roe
Not Rated - Approx 91 Min
Room 101/Foreboding Films

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Waaaaaaaaaaay back in October, I had James Harris aka Doc Terror on the MC Podcast and we discussed this film.  I had not seen it at that point, but you can bet your sweet ass that I was intrigued.  About a week after the podcast aired, I finally got a chance to sit down and watch the film on Amazon Streaming.  Sort of.  See, that was the month that I also found out that the useless internet service provider (HughesNet...which is my ONLY option deep in the woods of New Hampshire, apparently) only allows me 20GB of data a month.  That's what $130 gets me.  Useless.  I got about halfway through the film and then my bandwith was cut down to just about nothing and had to wait a week and a half to get service back, by which point my digital rental had obviously expired.  But anyway....I'm sure you don't really care about my internet problems, so let's get on with the film review, shall we?


I finally got around to picking up Houses on Blu Ray a while back and I watched it as a double feature with Digging Up The Marrow and I've gotta say, it paired quite nicely.  The film is another found footage flick, but it plays more like a documentary than anything else for most of the running time.  It revolves around five friends who rent an RV and set out on a quest the week before Halloween to find the most "extreme" haunted house.

Things begin predictably as they go to a few run of the mill haunt locations and see your standard actors dressed as clowns and creepy masked characters.  The haunts themselves while fun are nothing that impresses the group.  They begin to here of a group called The Blue Skeleton which has no designated location, and travels around from year to year.  The only way to find this mysterious haunt is to be invited.


After sniffing around, asking some questions and pissing off some of the local backwoods scare actors, they pick up the trail of The Blue Skeleton....or rather....The Blue Skeleton picks up on them.  A series of bizarre and freaky occurrences begin to plague the group as they make their way towards their ultimate fate.  A video appears online in a haunt forum depicting the entire group sleeping in their RV.  What looks like an animal heart is left in their refrigerator.  Halloween masks are left on their windshield wipers and lots of other stuff that would have had me sayin "Aw, HELL NO!" and getting the heck out of dodge.  But of course if our heroes did that, then there wouldn't be much of a movie, would there?


I must say that it doesn't paint scare actors in a very positive light.  I've never worked directly as a scare actor at a haunt, but I did work very closely with a haunt one year when  I developed a gothic illusion show (back in my magic days) to entertain the crowds in conjunction with the haunt.  I met all the scare actors and they were all really great people.  I never came across one who seemed mentally disturbed to me.  Granted that was at just one haunt....and I'm sure that there are some seriously messed up hombres and hombrettes (I just invented another new word!) out there who are scare actors....but this kinda made it look like they were all a few scoops short of a milkshake if ya catch my drift!

GORE 
No "real" gore, but plenty of make up gore at the various haunts they go to.

T&A 
Negative.

MONSTERS
Tons of ghouls, goblins, ghosts and fucked up clowns at the various haunts!

FINAL THOUGHTS
I've always had a soft spot for haunted houses and other haunted attractions, so I had a really good time with this one.  I'm also a sucker for road trip movies of pretty much any kind so that scratched that itch as well.  As far as found footage flicks go, it goes pretty easy on the shaky camera, so if you're the type that gets motion sickness from FF films, then you should be okay with this one.  Definitely worth checking out....especially in October before you go to some local (Or NOT local) haunts!


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