Review by Annie Riordan
Yesterday was my birthday. Today is “recovering from a severe blueberry vodka hangover” day, so suffice it to say that I am in even less interested in mincing words right now than usual. I didn’t much care for Dark House. Granted, it was nowhere near as abysmal as the malodorous bucketful of warthog diarrhea that was the 2009 film of the same name but it’s a couple of steep flights down from Salva’s previous films, exempli gratia Powder and Jeepers Creepers. I admit to liking, if not actually enjoying, Powder. Jeepers Creepers was fun, if not terribly brilliant and, at times, downright stupid. However, Dark House takes itself WAAAAAY too seriously, and as the story it has to tell is at times both childishly weak and stuffed full of ostentatious symbolism, it comes off rather like a kindergarten class’s interpretation of a Bertolt Brecht play.
So anyway, we have Nick Di Santo.
Just let that name sink in for a second or two. This is what I meant by “ostentatious symbolism” and it goes for the entire cast of characters, so pay attention.
Nick Di Santo is practically an orphan. He never knew his father and his mother is locked up in a local loony bin and has been ever since some awful tragedy happened more than a decade ago. What that tragedy was is unclear – not because the characters don’t really talk about it, but because the sound on the VOD copy I got was fucking awful. A lot of mumbling at the bottom of a coal mine, interspersed with jarringly crystalline moments of overdramatic incidental music. I spent much of the film with my fingers poised over the volume keys, trying in vain to sort out a plot and save my eardrums from the sound wave equivalent of a scud missile attack.
Anyway, his crazy momma (played by a very well preserved Lesley-Anne Down) summons him to the booby hatch on the eve of his 23rd birthday and proceeds to tell him… well, not much, really. At least nothing I could clearly make out. Seems she’s been having some intense conversations with the heat vent in the floorboard and it’s time Nick knew who his dad was/is. Except she never tells him and Nick storms out in a huff and later that night, Lesley-Ann is immolated by the angry heating vent and takes half the funny farm with her.
Oh and I forgot to mention that Nick is sorta psychic, in that he can tell how people are going to die just by touching them. So don’t let him touch you. He knew mom was going to be burned blacker than a Cajun barbecue, but what he didn’t know was that mom left a will behind and Nick has inherited a house he didn’t know existed, but which he’s been drawing since childhood.
So pack up the pregnant girlfriend (whose name is Eve, for fucks sake) and best buddy Ryan (not sure where that came from – was there an Apostle named Ryan?) and drive out into the cornfields of Western Bumblefuck, looking for a house that the walleyed locals say no longer stands. There was a flood, you see, and it done gone washed the house clean away, just like Noah’s ark. It’s one o’ them urban legends and there ain’t no need for ya’ll to go pokin’ yer big city noses around where theys not wanted.
Ugh, god help us all.
One minor car accident later and Nick, Eve and Ryan have joined forces with a team of land surveyors named Sam, Chris and Lillith, whose names are not only blatantly obvious to anyone with even a casual acquaintance with demonology, but whose willingness to join in the search for the house despite the fact that they don’t know these guys from Adam (a-ha, see what I did there?) should be just a tad suspect.
So yeah, they find the house, it’s a real dump and there’s some icky guy living there with a shotgun and a mullet and it’s hard to say which is scarier. Also, he’s played by Tobin Bell AKA Jigsaw and he seems to know exactly what’s going on but won’t tell anyone, just grumbles some cryptic shit and warns everyone to get out. And then these other guys show up who look like Native Americans in trench coats, and they all have this weird, hunched over side shuffle, like silverback gorillas with severe Labyrinthitis, and they start throwing axes and killing stuff. And they try to drive away but they keep ending up back at the house and hey look it that, it’s night time so we’d better spend the night IN THE SCARY HOUSE. And for some reason it’s imperative that we get down into the basement because that’s where all the answers are, but we never do and I still don’t know what the fuck happened because I couldn’t hear a goddamned thing that any of the characters were mumbling through their mouth holes apparently stuffed full of mud, Elmer’s glue and Laffy Taffy. And frankly, I don’t care. It ended. OR DID IT?! Because god knows, it’s not a complete horror movie unless you come full Ouroboros Worm and take us right back to the very fucking beginning, which is NOT a very good place to start. Sister Maria was a lying bitch, okay?
So yeah, there it is. Dark House officially releases tomorrow, March 11th 2014. Feel free to watch it for yourselves and make your own decisions. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.