horror house 2012Slater Brothers Entertainment
2012
NR

There are several movies that sport the title–or sometimes alternate title–“Horror House”, not counting the myriad of variations. This particular one is an obscure independent anthology that was released in 2012, and features none other than bad movie icon Lloyd Kaufman as the host of sorts.

Kaufman plays a real estate agent, selling a particular house to us, the hapless viewers, by telling about the former tenants that used to live in the house. What follows are five different short segments featuring stories about a little girl’s all-too-real “imaginary” friend (“Never Let Go”), a scorned woman goes to a gypsy to put a curse on her husband (“Be Careful What You Wish For”), a girl decides to become more like her favorite doll (“Lifelike”), a womanizing playa’ gets his comeuppance from one of his one night trysts (“Hot Stuff”), and a boy is read a rather scary bedtime story by his sister and finds he can’t cope as much as he said he could (“The Leapling”).

Horror House was a very, very boring movie to watch. Each and every short had some good ideas, but the payoff fell very, very flat with each one. Everything about these shorts scream “amateurish”, from the acting down to the effects themselves, to the non-twists that punctuate the endings like a wet fart. I quipped to one of my housemates at the Victorian that the only good thing about this movie was Lloyd Kaufman’s segments introducing the shorts, and I found myself wishing for the shorts themselves to end so we can get back to the gleeful Mr. Kaufman to take away the boredom of watching this.

Should have known by the DVD cover art–the arbitrary cleavage shot to camouflage the fact that the material contained therein was not worth the time and effort to watch it. Not really painful, just boooooring. Pass.