Dark House

Plot synopsis:
Dark House tells the story of the Old Darrode House, where Janet Darrode ran a foster home for children and then murdered all of them and killed herself. The film opens with a young girl who walks into the house on the day of the massacre and discovers the bloody scene of the crime.
Fourteen years later, local girl and student actress Claire Thompson has been seeing her therapist over an experience she had in the house which left her disturbed. He suggests that she revisit the old house, but she has never been able to get past the gate.
When horror mogul Walston Rey appears in her advanced acting class, he reveals that he has converted the house into a horror attraction site and that he wants to hire Claire and her classmates to work as hosts to his attraction. Claire sees the opportunity as a chance to enter the house safely surrounded by her peers. In the house, Walston and his staff proudly show off their holographic three-dimensional system which creates lifelike interactive and harmless horror figures, but when Mrs. Darrode's ghost gets into the system, the holograms become real and are activated by fear. They start killing everyone inside as the survivors try to shut down the system and try to escape.
Claire finally manages to remember what happened in the house years ago. She was fostered under the care of Mrs. Darrode, who was an abusive religious fanatic. As a child Claire one day led a rebellion among the other kids. They burned their Holy Bibles and rejected Mrs. Darrode's teachings. Mrs. Darrode flew into a psychotic rage and murdered all the children, labeling them sinners and heretics, with the exception of Claire who only managed to escape by hiding in a closet. Then struck by remorse for what she had done, Mrs. Darrode thrust her hands into the kitchen garbage disposal and killed herself.
In the present day after remembering, Claire loses her fear and flies at Mrs. Darrode, who disappears. She is discovered by the police, who believe she was responsible for the murders and is committed to a mental asylum.
In the final scenes of the film, the girl who discovered the scene all those years ago also comes to the house to try to come to terms with her trauma. She and her boyfriend are quickly locked into the house and are killed. The film ends with Claire strapped to a straitjacket in a padded cell screaming "SHE'S STILL OUT THERE!"

Tags: violence

Review:
That's the good thing: they're clearly having a good time, giving their movie a fair bit of energy and pace and going to town with the visual effects and splatter.
In the end, one is likely to forget this pretty quickly, but enjoy themselves while the movie plays out.Meghan Ory stars as Claire, who as a seven year old girl was witness to the massacre of some other children in a foster home.
Now Claire is a teen aged drama student who learns that "house of horrors" creator / showman Walston (Jeffrey Combs, who may provide enough reason to watch for those who otherwise wouldn't bother checking this out) is setting up his latest attraction in that same house.
Skip this one, it isn't so bad it's funny, the death and gore is very average, the 'brief nudity' (if that's your bag) is CGI, and the 'Dark House' looks just like a normal suburban house.
Reading some of the positive reviews that Dark House has received makes me wonder if there is something wrong with me, but then I remember: no, there is something wrong with this film.I have always been a horror buff, so I forgive the inevitable cliché moments that are trademark to the genre.
I like it when horror movies look mildly makeshift or amateur, or have a grungy misguided feel, as it can make them more genuine and edgy; but this just looked like something pieced together by a bunch of pretentious film students assigned a last-minute project.
Wow, most of the time when you watch some of these horror movies you expect to see crap.
Fantastic horror movie, decent acting, good story and direction.
This movie reminded me a little bit of house on haunted hill.
Shot in just 18 days, Dark House looks, sounds and feels a lot better than the majority of studio horror films I see in any given year.
Combs chews scenery, but he does it with rakish, fun-loving panache; Whyte is encumbered with costume, affectation and accoutrement, but his indisputable spirit shines through; and Cole plays the stereotypical gloomy goth girl with droll wit and intelligence.If you enjoy old-fashioned haunted house flicks with plenty of snarky humor, unabashed boo-scares, and grand guignol gore, step into Dark House..
When a group of drama students are hired to play parts in a live action haunted house attraction, things go from fun to fatal in Dark House – a film presented at the Fangoria Frightfest.Jeffrey Combs plays Walston Rey, a flamboyant man channeling Geoffrey Rush's character from 1999's House on Haunted Hill.
Walston recruits the young actors to play roles in a house considered haunted by legend due to a 14-year-old murder spree of young children by psycho Janet Darrode.
Miss Darrode also perished gruesomely in the house and the legend of her spirit haunting the home has become legendary.Walston's intention is to have two reporters visit the house and with the use of his live actors and a sophisticated audio-video-hologram system, they will be able to project images of everything from flesh eating zombies to axe wielding clowns.Meghan Ory plays Claire, an acting student who just so happens to have a history with the house as she was the last child to venture through its doors and exit alive.
Fourteen years of therapy and bad dreams lead to her confrontation with her demons in the house when the holograms come alive and begin to diabolically kill all those trapped inside.Dark House is filled with true scares and some of the creepiest ghost-like monsters since Thir13een Ghosts in 2001.
Director Darin Scott working on his own screenplay mixes some quality scares with spooky characters and it is no surprise that the film was the winner for best feature at the Shriekfest Film Festival in 2009.Not all the humor in Dark House works to the expected result and the film commits the new cardinal horror sin (at least amongst fans) with the overuse of CGI blood.
Terrible smarmy cops summing up the crimes, unbelievable acting of the little girl who discovers the bodies in the beginning of movie, and horrible idea of the black spooky mist flying around the room.
At the same time an impresario, (Jeffery Combs) seeking to create the ultimate Haunted House, leases the nightmarish resident, hires a group of actors to staff his house of horrors with state-of-the-arts holographs visual effects and to scare the daylights out of his visitors.
What's worse, it's so bad you can't make much of a judgment about the cast other than how pretty they are.The setup is basic haunted house horror.
Her acting class runs an exercise of no value other than to give the audience a thumbnail stereotype of each character and then we get the horror-meister who wants to setup a reality/horror type show in the old Darrode House.
Claire jumps at the chance to face her fears, buttressed by a crowd of people she knows and talks them into becoming the cast for the new show.What follows is the most ridiculous, contrived horror-schlock that has nothing to do with the setup, no rising action, just scene after scene of hellish horror with no real context.This was so bad that I couldn't make it through the whole thing.
Hired to play parts in a mogul's new horror attraction, a troupe of actors arrives at a reputedly haunted house to prepare for the place to open find the past's grisly secrets coming back to kill them one by one and forcing them to battle their way through the attractions.This one was actually a lot of fun and manages to have a lot of good stuff about it.
A large part of this one is the film's startling atmosphere throughout here as the setting is fantastically used and milked for it's worth.starting off with a stellar backstory here about the abusive owner and the fate of her and the children in here come start this off nicely, and from there this one has a ton to like with the setup for the house as the interactions with the attractions are an absolute blast.
These provide the film with a great setting for the action within here as these here are fun, from the initial hallway encounter that kills off the guide while they believe it's part of the act, the walk-through of the different setups throughout the rooms from the different ghosts engaging in grandiose and elaborate attractions that not only provide this one with some great scenes but also setting up how she's slowly taking over unleashing the ghosts upon the guests.
That leads into the fun final half as the killings start getting pretty bloody when they do strike, since it's pretty late into the film when they do begin toying with them in a series of stellar confrontations that they're unsure of how to react to, from the brawl with the night to the group being trapped in the bathroom and the harrowing encounter in the basement control room which are really chilling and fun sequences that bring about the best use of the ghosts' presence.
For starters, it takes 30 minutes to get to the house & no scares once there.Coombs is good but the back story is lame & grinds the movie to a halt every time it's explained, which is often.
He's one of the best horror actors out there and is greatly underrated.A little girl witness a massacre and 14 years later takes the advice from her therapist to visit the house once again.
Of course, things are not always what they seem at first.Using holographic illusions, the Darrode House is to be turned into a horror attraction - The Dark House by Walston (Jeffrey Combs of Reanimator films).Diane Salinger of Rest Stop fame is Ms. Darrode, the religious wacko that committed the horrible crimes, and she is fantastic.Samantha (Meghan Maureen McDonough) just wants to hook up with the luscious blonde Ariel (Bevin Prince).Needless to say, the house takes over and the attraction becomes real.
Ending was great.If you liked House On Haunted Hill or 13 Ghosts, you'll find this film worth the time invested..
The problem is that they don't understand why people like dark house rides so when they make a film of it they get it wrong..
only watched it out of boredom, yet after just moments i was totally gripped, never a dull second, seriously if your thinking of watching this film don't be put off by the cover making it look a bit predictable like i was for SO long, because its AMAZING!!!
A troupe of actors hired for a haunted house attraction soon find that they are working in a true house of horror.Can Jeffrey Combs carry a film?
While this may not be one of his best roles, he at least spends a fair amount of time on screen.Unfortunately, there is nothing new about people going into a haunted house and soon finding out it is really a house full of horrors.
The infamous Darroh (or something similar that almost sounds like dark) House in which seven foster children where brutally murdered 14 years ago, is being reopened as a horror attraction called Dark House.
One of them, Claire (played by Megan Ory), witnessed the brutal suicide of the children's tormentor and views this new position as a way to bury the demons of the past.To assist are brave actors, the house works by an advanced hologram system designed to react to fear and excitement.
With "Dark House" being a Fangoria FrightFest movie and with it having Jeffrey Combs on the cast list, then I had really high hopes and expectations to the movie.
This movie just didn't turn out to be what I had hoped.The story is about a group of young people who have to star in a philanthropist's (played by Jeffrey Combs) latest attraction in haunted attractions, where he turned a ghastly house into an attraction.
Amongst the group is Claire (played by Meghan Ory) who survived the ordeal as a child, and is there now to face the demons of her past - demons that she soon figures out are none too happy about being things of the past.There were aspects to the storyline that worked out nicely enough, but in a grander picture, then the movie just didn't really impress or manage to stand out in the horror genre.Effects-wise, then "Dark House" was adequate, making good enough use of the special effects throughout the entire movie.
The movie was especially well carried by Meghan Ory and Jeffrey Combs."Dark House" wasn't a particularly impressive experience, and it will quickly find a place on the shelves in my movie collection, never to be played again.
The lead girl in the movie had no believable emotion to go along with a lifeless plot.The sets looked and felt like a stage, the dialog felt like is was being read from a teleprompter and there was "0" character development.
The countless mistakes in this movie made it difficult to take it seriously enough to feel the frightening aspect of it, which probably didn't stand a chance to surface anyway because of some of the tacky graphics.some scenes were more impressive than others, but the lesser graphics like digital black swooshing smoke for a thrilling effect had quite the opposite - seemed out of place and random.
Who cares.Jeffrey Combs tries to inflate this into something better than the average dead teenager flick, but the whole notion of "You didn't really see holograms/ghosts killing people, it was the crazy chick all along" ending just didn't make sense.Just dropped this from a 5 to a 3 just thinking about the plot illogic.
Jeffrey Combs' Walston Rey is an enthusiastic owner of haunted house attractions, preparing for his biggest and best yet, the old Darrode estate notorious for a massacre of orphans at the hands of their den mother.
Claire(Meghan Ory)is the lone survivor of that massacre and her memories of that awful day are buried within her mind..encouraged by her therapist, Claire will coerce the students of her acting class to accept Rey's job offers to work in various roles in his new spook house, leading patrons through his "maze of horrors" utilizing state of the art digital holograph technology( a sort of Illusion system)to scare them.
Ms. Darrode, we come to find out through snippets of memory which return to Claire as she spends time in the house, was a religious fanatic who whipped her children repeatedly while they quoted verse, believing them to be demon possessed.
In this movie we are led to believe that holographic killers can gain enough physical essence to attack real human beings thanks to Janet's infecting the programming which brought them to life..a bit too silly and far fetched for me personally, although there's an ending(a twist, I guess)that questions everything we witnessed take place once the doors and windows were locked shut and Ms. Darrode started up the killing spree.
By-the-numbers gory house movies usually steal from the best (13 Ghosts, House on Haunted Hill, etc.), then season with a little Rob Zombie.
As if that wasn't odd enough it cuts to a woman in her 20s waking up from a nightmare 14 years later only to learn she is actually now a college student taking acting classes with one of every campy horror cliché.
The acting is terrible and it reminds you of your children's school play but not as adorable.Now we have these college kids going to work at the same house the mass murders took place in which is unlikely this house would realistically be sold or open to the public in any way after the slaughtering of children.
After spending the longest hour and a half you could imagine leading you to believe you are following at least for the most part what is going on to who and how they inject a random end scene to frustrate you.The last 2 minutes of the film cut to a woman in her mid 30s standing in front of the house with a young jock.
Fourteen years ago (even though some of the cars were from the mid-2000s), Claire (Meghan Ory) was horrifically traumatized in the "Darrode House," the site of a brutal massacre that left seven children dead by the hand of their evil foster mother Miss Darrode.
The creator of the haunted house, entrepreneur Walston (played by horror icon Jeffrey Combs), has chosen none other than the Darrode House itself in which to stage the house of terrors!
. .As many horror fans will tell, it is very difficult to make a great "haunted house" movie.
Other than 'Paranormal Activity,' it has been several years since the U.S. has had an overly successful (critically and/or financially) haunted house film, instead having mediocre pictures like 'An American Haunting' or 'The Haunting in Connecticut.' One of the major failures of the subgenre comes from the lack of subtlety that ends up ruining any chance at real terror.
That being said, it seems that 'Dark House' was never made to be 'the next great haunted house film.' It was aware of its limitations and, instead of true fear, it went for the next best things in horror: fun & blood.
And, while a darker 'Dark House' may have been a welcome idea, this way worked well enough for a fun evening.On the technical side of the film, there isn't a lot to complain about.
However, viewers looking for an entertaining evening with a few jump scares and some gore will find enjoyment in 'Dark House.'Final Verdict: 6/10.-AP3-.
You could take the basic idea of people working in a haunted house being picked off and make a really good scary movie, it's a shame they didn't have the skill to do it.Thinly sketched characters you don't care about, lame jump shocks with loud noises, incoherent plot, crappy acting and no real tension..yep, it's a modern horror movie!.
A group of eager young drama students are recruited to work in a fancy hi-tech haunted house attraction owned by flamboyant impresario Walston Rey (splendidly played with lip-smacking theatrical zeal by Jeffrey Combs).
I even enjoyed the dialogue: "You can't go in there!" "Watch me." But, alas, everything went downhill from there.To begin with, why would the brave little girl who entered the supposedly scary Darrode House not scream when she saw several dead children strewn throughout the house?
I love good haunted house movies.
Claire almost believes it was real but when she looks back and his body is gone she is convinced it was all an act and she continues the tourThe film continues with Garrode using the holograms to kill everyone of one at time.
The haunted house looks like a lot of fun though.
It seemed like a good choice what with a bunch of young friends hanging out in a haunted house.The ambiance here didn't fit the movie.
I think they sacrificed all the production funds for special effects, which were cool, but not great.The plot is simple: a haunted house producer hires aspiring acting students to perform in his latest production.
This like really bad version of The House on Haunted Hill Meets Thir13en Ghosts (Remakes) put into one big MESS!.
I should have just fast forward the first 35 mins of the movie.The ending did not make no sense what so ever, you will need ignore what you saw at the start of movie.This like really bad version of The Haunted Hill Meets Thir13en Ghosts (Remakes) put into one big MESS!3 out of 10.
The plot is that a horror attraction maestro played by Jeffrey Combs, one of the only actors alive today worthy of calling himself a horror movie star, opens an attraction in a house where a woman killed all of her foster kids.
The movie shows weak knowledge of the paranormal, horror characters that don't belong in a haunted house and a weak plot driven forward by needless blood and gore.