Writers: Darrin Scott, Kerry Douglas Dye
Notable Cast: Jeffrey Combs
Six degrees of A Nightmare on Elm Street: This film features Jeffrey Combs, who was in The Attic Expeditions with Andras Jones, who played Rick in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4.
Okay, it took me a month, but I'm finally writing my first non-introductory blog post!
Dark House was one of the eight films released under the "Fangoria Frightfest" label in 2010, and had the honor of being the only of those films to get a token theatrical release. I wasn't expecting much from the set-up - a dead teenager body count movie in a haunted house - but this film actually delivers on its premise rather well.
The story begins "14 years ago," when a religious woman stabbed to death seven foster children in her care, before dispatching herself in one of the more gruesome ways imaginable. Jump to the present day, where Claire (Meghan Ory), a girl who witnessed the events of the massacre, has grown up into an attractive theater student who has repressed the memories of that day. When a haunted attraction promoter (Jeffrey Combs) decides to convert the site of the massacre into a haunted house, he highers Claire and five of her classmates to be his actors for opening night. Claire agrees to participate, hoping it will help her remember and recover from the events of her past.
While not very big, the haunted house is chock full of sophisticated holograms featuring mad scientists, axe-wielding maniacs, and medieval torturers, among other things. The technical sophistication of the holograms involves some MAJOR suspension of disbelief, but it would be a pretty cool attraction if it actually existed. When Jeffrey Combs (being his Jeffrey Combsiest) hires Claire and her five friends at $300 a pop, my first thought was, "How would a haunted house make enough in one night to cover $1,800 in actor fees?" But if such realistic and effective holograms actually existed, I'll be damned if he couldn't charge an insanely high ticket price for admittance.
But I digress. Anyway, things go horribly wrong, illusions come alive, people die, and the ghosts of Claire's past return to haunt her. You get the gist...
While the characters are paper thin - each one has one personality trait that every line of their dialogue reflects (goth girl! geek! lesbian!) - and we never get the impression that any of them really like each other that much, they are at least differentiated enough that we know who's who, and it's easy to keep track of their declining numbers. The writer/director makes a valiant effort to give us gory, creative deaths, and succeeds more often than not, making effective use of the location and scenario. He also manages to work in a large number of potential victim characters - we have six actors, three other employees at the haunted house, and two reporters. So thank you, Darin Scott, for giving us a body count movie with lots of bodies to count!
There's even an interesting reveal regarding Claire's memories from 14 years ago, and I have to say I found those scenes a little chilling. The rest of the film wasn't terribly frightening, but it moved along at a good pace and did its best to be consistently inventive and entertaining.
I've only seen one other Fangoria Frightfest film - The Tomb - and this one was far and away a better film. It won't go down as a horror classic, but worth a look if you like the subgenre of horror films.
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