Chain Reaction

Plot synopsis:
Eddie Kasalivich (Keanu Reeves) is a student machinist working with a team from the University of Chicago to obtain clean energy from water by efficiently splitting the hydrogen and oxygen atoms from the water molecules. While working at home, Eddie inadvertently discovers the secret: a frequency that enables a perfect stabilization of their process. The machine is perfected the next day in the lab and everything appears to be working and stable. To celebrate, a party is thrown in the lab. That night after the party, project physicist Dr. Lily Sinclair (Rachel Weisz) tries to leave the lab but her car battery is dead. Eddie offers to take her home by taxi; but, later says they took a bus. Back in the lab, Drs. Alistair Barkley and Lu Chen are on their computers preparing to upload their discovery to the Internet so the world can share in this new discovery, speaking Chinese. Meanwhile, a van is seen driving toward the lab. Chen hears a noise and goes to investigate, but is kidnapped by unknown assailants as Alistair also comes under attack.
Meanwhile, Lily and Eddie arrive at her house and after making sure she is okay, Eddie heads back to the lab to get his motorcycle. As he arrives at the lab, he sees a van leaving and hears alarms coming from the lab. He runs inside to find Alistair with a plastic bag over his head and Chen nowhere to be found. The hydrogen reactor is dangerously unstable and Eddie is unable to shut it down. Realizing the reactor is going to overload, he speeds away on his bike as a concealed detonator triggers a massive hydrogen explosion that destroys the lab and surrounding streets. As rescue crews arrive, Eddie is questioned by the police and later the FBI about what happened the night of the blast. Upon returning with Lily to their homes, they realize that they are being framed as fake evidence is planted in both of their houses.
Both go on the run and head to an observatory belonging to Maggie McDermott, an old friend of Eddie's. After resting up, they contact Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman), the man funding the project (along with DARPA), but they're almost caught in the process and barely manage to escape. As Eddie and Lily are evading more police, Paul meets with Lyman Earl Collier (Brian Cox) at C-Systems Research complex to discuss the current events. It becomes apparent that the plot to destroy the lab and frame Eddie and Lily for it was orchestrated by the company, and that Lyman is responsible. Despite some disagreement, Paul and Lyman decide to continue the hunt for Eddie and Lily, a task made easier when Eddie sends a coded message to Paul requesting another place to meet. At this new rendezvous, Paul reveals he was involved, but wants to talk somewhere else. The meeting ends in an ambush, and Lily is captured as Eddie barely escapes.
By tracing the license plate on the van used in the ambush, Eddie is able to track them to the C-Systems Research facility where Lily and Chen are being held. When C-Systems' test reactor fails again, Paul, the scientists, and the prisoners all leave the room, so Eddie takes the opportunity to "fix" the system. The next morning, one of the other scientists discovers the working reactor and everyone celebrates. Paul is suspicious, and immediately obtains a download of the working data, and secretly gives it to his assistant, Anita, for safekeeping. He then finds Eddie at a computer in the company boardroom. There, Eddie demands to be let go in exchange for making the reactor work. Paul agrees but Lyman refuses, believing that the process already works, so Eddie sets the reactor to explode while sending proof of his innocence to the FBI and blueprints of the reactor to "hopefully a couple thousand" international scientists. Lyman responds by shooting Chen dead, then leaving both Eddie and Lily to die in the explosion as he, Paul, and their staff flee the site, setting lockdown doors on the way.
Paul shoots Lyman for overstepping the bounds of the program, leaving his body in an elevator to be incinerated in the ensuing inferno. During his own escape, Paul deactivates the containment, letting Eddie and Lily escape, and Lyman's remains to be destroyed. As he is doing this, Eddie and Lily struggle with one of Lyman's henchmen over an ascending construction lift, ending in Eddie and Lily climbing aboard it, moments before a blast wave sweeps into the tunnel. Both Eddie and Lily survive the shockwave to be met by FBI now convinced of their innocence, who take them to safety. Paul departs the scene via chauffeured sedan. He is last seen dictating a memo to Anita. The memo informs the Director of CIA that C-System is "...no longer a viable entity. Will be in contact."

Tags: violence

Review:
This pleasure lasted exactly until one of the actors started to speak.This movie proves that basic technical skills do not make good directing: Apart from moving the camera in the right way, a director also has to make decisions concerning things that do or don't work.
Ittenbach's movie fails miserably in the attempt to get some acting out of the amateur cast.I sometimes enjoy amateur actors, but here we have a disastrous collision between the lack of acting skills and the inane things the poor people are supposed to say.
I thought his career had hit rock bottom when he appeared in "House of the Dead", but it's strange how things can always get worse.The only thing that Ittenbach is known to do really well is over-the-top splatter and gore effects.
While driving on a lonely road a bus with dangerous inmates from Seattle, the driver crashes on a car driven by Dr. Douglas Madsen (Christopher Kriesa) and the three prisoners leaded by Arthur Palmer (Simon Newby) escape and execute the security guards.
While in a bus with dangerous inmates, the bus crashes on a car and the story repeats like in a déjà vu for Dr. Douglas and the criminals."House of Blood" is an extremely violent and gore, with scary and gruesome special effects.
But there are good points in the story and with improvements and better actors, this movie would have a great potential.
The exact same story occurs twice in each half of the movie, only with different characters, except for Dr. Douglas Madsen who appears both times.
It's like watching a new horror movie and then the quick remake or something of that sort.I hate being harsh with my reviews, because regardless of how much I can like or dislike a film, there's always a noble effort coming from a director, the cast members and everyone involved in a movie.
The story is about four prisoners and a doctor who survived a crash.(The doctor's car hit the bus.) They kill the guards who were on that bus an try to run for the boarder.After hours of walking they find this old cabin in the woods.
Dr.Douglas Madsen is on his way back home from work one day when his car collides with a prison bus,setting off a horrific chain of events.The four surviving prisoners,one of whom is severely injured,take the doctor hostage and flee into Canada.The group of intruders finds refuge in a mysterious,isolated house inhabited by a very strange family of bloodthirsty cannibal demons..."House of Blood" is a mediocre horror film.The acting is horrible,the dialogue is ridiculous and there is no suspense.Many people compared this film to Uwe Boll's cinematic atrocities like "House of the Dead" or "Alone in the Dark",but I wouldn't go so far to call it worse than them.At least "House of Blood" contains plenty of grue including head explosions,decapitations and chainsaw dismemberment.Still this one is only for die-hard horror fans.5 out of 10 and that's being generous..
With his early, (very) low-budget splatter films, Olaf Ittenbach proved that he could make a well constructed horror movie, despite technical limitations and a cast that obviously needed a few more acting lessons.
well, it maketh me laugh!A dead crow drops from a tree to the ground and dislodges a rock, which hits a car (belonging to a doctor), that crashes into a bus-load of violent criminals, who escape into the woods (taking the doctor hostage) and eventually wind up in a house occupied by weird religious folk (who speaketh in ye olde dialect), who then transform into flesh-eating demons.
and so on.And when a third dead crow causes even more trouble later on, one wonders whether it might be wise just to cut down all of the trees along this stretch of road, to bring down the accident rate.As always with an Ittenbach film, there is plenty of gruesome gore on display (with some very nasty crushed heads being the most sickening of these), but with quite a long running time, there are also periods in which the film is just too 'dry'.
Jurgen Prochnow is given nothing much to do, there is lots of mundane chit-chat, and the whole 'deja-vu' angle quickly starts to irritate.Ittenbach is a director who has shown a lot of promise in the past; he certainly knows how to put together a decent gore scene.
I had to watch this in 3 different sittings and maybe that's the best way to see it without becoming tired of the story.There are events that set off a chain reaction and sets a series of events into motion.House of Blood (called Chain Reaction on the IMDb) is really a pretty terrible movie in many respects.
The whole "chain reaction" aspect and other parts of the writing are pretty poor.House of Blood is pretty poor and I'd only suggest a rental if you want something to make fun of or are that desperate for gore effects (lots of the red stuff flows).
After surviving a prison bus crash out in the wilderness, a doctor is taken hostage to tend to a wounded inmate, only for the house they choose to seek shelter in belongs to a race of bloodthirsty demons and dispatch the group one-by-one.This was an overall enjoyable and entertaining effort, though there were some pretty big flaws present.
The greatest plus for the film, though, is that none of that matters when it gets going and starts to deliver the goods, and this one does a great job at producing copious and over-the-top quantities of gore and bloodshed.
He started out directing low-budget splatter films like "Burning Moon", "Black Past" and "Premutos: Lord of the Dead", which got him a cult following.
He then graduated to doing make-up and gore effects for things like Uwe Boll movies, and directing larger budgeted movies like "Legion of the Damned", "Garden of Love" and "Dard Divorce", which were attempts at doing more mainstream friendly horror.
Another one of these attempts is 2006's "House of Blood" (originally called "Chain Reaction"), which suffice to say, is pretty bad.Dr. Douglas Madsen (Christopher Kriesa) has been taken hostage by a group of escaped convicts, who decide to take refuge in a cottage.
The family then turns into bloodthirsty demons (is there any other kind?) and kills the criminals, but Dr. Madsen is saved by local girl Alice (Olaf's wife Martina), and ends up being interrogated by police (one of the officers is played by Jürgen Prochnow), and of course, they don't believe his story, so he ends up taking a bus ride to a prison with some inmates.
The bus crashes, and you can guess what happens next.I'll say this much about "House of Blood": The gore and splatter FX are pretty impressive, the cinematography is good, and Kriesa delivers a good performance.
Also, while the gore is effective, there isn't enough, as the viewer has to wait for what feels like a very long time for the splatter to hit-until then it's a lot talking and yelling at one another.Then there's the fact that the direction, editing and script (which Ittenbach co-wrote with Thmosat Reitmar) are all pretty poor.
The convicts escape but take an old doctor with them because a prisoner's brother has been hurt in the accident, and they want to make sure he's okay.After a lot of needless swearing, countless "f" words (about 1,000), they come across an old village from about two centuries back, inhabited by vampires.
Not sure if that's the frame of mind you should be in when going into it, but I came out completely satisfied and actually impressed with this Ittenbach flick.I don't know what some other people were complaining about, especially the ones that I know have seen loads of horror.
The story was not tough to follow, the acting felt inspired (meaning they were having fun) though it was over-the-top and most were probably German pals of Olaf, the writing was cheesy but delivered exactly what was needed, and of course the gore was awesome.
The region 1 (USA) version is cut, and you do not get that true brutal violence you get in normal Olaf gore outings.A group of prisoners on a bus crash in the middle of "bumf@ck nowhere", and seek freedom by trudging through the woods so they can reach Canada.
Like other Ittenbach movies, the villains here are always very evil, so expect blood and expect a lot.
It often happens that German productions, which are good movies, become bad after an English translation.I liked the storyline of this movie, because I didn't often see a Movie of that kind with an interesting story.
I only think if the story writers had left the last 5 seconds away, the ending would have been much better.Maybe some Horror fans could be disappointed of this movie because there aren't really many gore scenes and they don't last long, like they do in some splatters.
But this movie is able to create a certain suspense, because it's not possible to guess the ending of this movie.The actors aren't good, but I didn't find the camera work really bad..
Chain Reaction (aka House of Blood) is a professional, good looking 35 mm film, with car crashing, great makeup and gore FX but it lacks in entertainment value.
The plot is very hard to follow and the action scenes comes only in bits (when they come are cool with gore and blood, but its a very talkie movie, and the dialogs sucks.
The "fromdusktilldawnesque" Legion of the Dead was pretty cool and entertaining, but stuff like this or Riverplay make me think if i will watch a new Ittembach movie.
We have DirecTV with HBO, Starz and Encore channels so we Tivo many movies and make best of what we pay monthly fee for.This month Blockbuster sent a coupon for $1.99 deal for movie rentals until end of December.I had seen previews of this movie on Black Dahlia DVD and it looked like it might be a good horror movie.Boy, was I mistaken.
This was one of the worst movies I've seen in I don't know how long.The acting was really horrible.
They run around in the woods, run into a fog and end up in a cabin where it appears they have run into a family that only watched Foghorn Leghorn cartoons ("I sayeth what do you have in the bag?") After that, all hell breaks loose and the movie becomes a useless gore fest (mutilations, exploding heads, etc.) I actually dozed off a couple of times.If you can avoid this one, please do..
For a low budget direct-to-DVD flick, the cinematography of "House Of Blood" (aka "Chain Reaction") looks mighty good.
the only reason why I'm giving this movie a 4 out of 10 is because there are some really good car crash effects, and you have to admit that for a low budget movie the effects in it are pretty descent, but plot is not a strong on this one,story either and the performance of the actors is really really bad, no true feelings, lack of emotion, and a lot of w.t.f scenes, this is a pretty disposable film, there are a million of them, better played, more effects, better photography, not so absurd choreography, etc...
with the exception of "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" another P.O.S movie.Doesn't the main bad guy, I have no idea of his name, the one that was in control from the looks of things, didn't anyone tell him to act instead of shout to sound menacing?
There's really not much in the way of characters to become familiar with so if you like blood and gore, this movie is for you..
HOUSE OF BLOOD appears to be a slightly higher budget and more "mainstream" film from director Olaf (PREMUTOS, BURNING MOON, GARDEN OF LOVE, etc...) Ittenbach.
Again, we have a relatively entertaining, but poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly executed splatter film.A group of convicts escape from their prison transport bus when a freak accident causes the bus to crash.
HOUSE OF BLOOD isn't the worst thing I've seen, and it does have a few splattery moments - but sitting through the pathetic acting and retarded storyline is pretty tedious.
Mr. ittenbach even managed to include elements to the plot that was not just working for the gore elements, some at least...Basically you get a straight horror movie about a bus of criminals on their way from one prison to the next that crashes in a car accident.
but I don't want to see that in a movie with the production values of "House of blood" but rather in a school play.There is some mysterious twists that lead to the doctor witnessing the events twice in a kind of time-loop which could have worked along with the straight "house full of bloodfreaks"-plot but just watch the ending and you'll understand why it doesn't.
"House of Blood" is by far superior to the incredibly dumb "Dard Divorce" but it angers me again that Ittenbach trashes so much potential with a mix of good and abysmal actors and his obvious lack of talent for story writing.
Chain Reaction, or House of Blood as it's much more commonly known, starts as a prison van escorting various criminals crashes trying to avoid another vehicle in 'the middle of nowhere'.
Surrounded by thick isolated forest they head for the Canadian border but stumble across an old house where they seek shelter, inside they find a strange family who turn out be be Vampiric demons who feast on flesh & blood & they're very hungry...This German production was executive produced, co-written & directed by Olaf Ittenbach & having a quick browse through the comments here on the IMDb I see that's it's fairly unliked & that it's one of the worst films ever, in my opinion that's complete bo**ocks as I think it's a decent attempt at something a bit different.
I have to say I quite liked this idea, at least we didn't have put put up with these unlikable character's for the entire duration of the film, at least the film tries to cram in lots of blood, gore & violence, at least there isn't long tedious passages of dialogue to pad things out & I must admit I didn't know where the film was going with it.
I'm proud to stand up for what I believe & if that means going against 'popular' opinion so be it, I LIKED THIS FILM & it's as simple & straight forward as that.Director Ittenbach does OK, there is some decent camera-work & the special effects are good.
I think it might be just that I've seen so many crap horror films lately (the atrocious The Dead of Night (2004) to name but one) that this seems like an absolute masterpiece by comparison & all that cool frenzied gore helps too.
There's a cabin in the middle of the woods, far from modern civilization, inhabited by a group of unusual people who speak Old English and become demonically possessed savages with a craving for "anything with blood in it." Poor Dr. Douglas Madsen(Christopher Kriesa), traveling to pick up medical equipment, happens to come across a bus wreck carrying evil inmates who have eliminated the security assigned to keep them detained.
A feeling of deja vu for Doug and, as before, another group of inmates will force the doc to accompany them into the woods, with a goal of heading north..just guess what happens.Forget the story-line, director Olaf Ittenbach's horror tale is mostly a German splatter-fest..pure unadulterated gore movie, loaded with outrageous violence.
I will say this..Olaf Ittenbach has some style, but his attempts at messing with the chronology in the story-line(..going back and forth in time, often in the case of Doug, such as his interrogation scenes tied in with the second act and how events unfold in Doug's life and how the whole escape of the inmates came to be), I felt were unnecessary.
Sure, Ittenbach is directing, but that doesn't mean it was a piece of you-know-what like everyone seems to think about Uwe Boll's films.
I won't spoil it, but this movie is FULL of blood, guns, action scenes, more blood, a possessed old English speaking devil-like cult in a church in the middle of the woods, and more blood.
In short, just go see this film if you are a guy and love lots of guns, blood, action, with a great story and mix of horror.
The gory bits and nauseating effects form the only highlights in "House of Blood", as the rest of the film is one major pitiable effort, complete with poor plotting, total lacking of coherence & suspense and probably the worst acting performances you've ever seen in your life.
The plot was not as bad as the script, acting, and gore were.
and it always takes days or even weeks before I can forget about it again.It is so unnecessary I think, to produce something that makes people feel bad - what is the point of that..?The only thing that was good in this movie, was the actor playing the Doctor.
*Start of Spoiler* You realize, that it's an Olaf Ittenbach movie when the fugitives reach an old cabin in the woods, where a strange sect of possessed people (lol) lives.
The funniest thing is, that after this incident in the cabin, the whole story is repeating itself with the doctor as the only survivor *End of Spoiler*If you like Olaf Ittenbach movies, you might perhaps also enjoy this one.
Although the actors do their job quite well, the plot is much too pointless and i missed this aspect of scenes being so bad, that it's again ridiculous and funny (If you know Ittenbach movies, you know what I mean ;) ) There is also a lot of gore, but not so much than in his other movies.