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DEATH HOUSE (2018)
Starring: Kane Hodder, Tony Tood, Barbara Crampton, Dee Wallace, Michael Berryman, Bill Moseley, Danny Trejo and some other douchebags...
Director/Writer: B. Harrison Smith (Fuck. Off).
Death House is more terrible than anyone has ever said it is.
Taking a concept like compiling all of the horror icons of the past into one movie (although it actually isn't all of them) with the inclusion of fun effects artists and all be done as an independent film at just under 1 million dollars then fucking it all up to fucking shit is quite a fleet and only serves to make the horror icons of the past look much older and more worthless than ever.
What calls itself the Expendables of Horror is living up to that name in the most painfully ironic way possible.
Our story begins with Tony Todd sticking his hand deeply into a victim's stomach and then it heals itself...what? Oh but don't worry because the entire film takes you behind the scenes of what seems to be a globally-run secret prison called "The Death House" where they imprison the world's most horrific and psychotic criminals forcing them to re-live their moments of committing their crimes with the state of the art, yet glitchy, virtual reality systems
However, a weird Nazi kid infiltrates and attacks one of the prison guards with an explosive EMP that releases all the prisoners into a crazy slightly bloody riot, so now it's up to two federal agents and Dee Wallace to somehow stop whatever is happening because who gives a fucking shit, nothing makes sense and nothing really matters because fuck it.
This is one of the biggest most unforgivable problems with this movie is the story in question is not in any way interesting and a terrible concept to wrap a whole movie around. It makes you think of better movies that do the concept way better like The Cabin in the Woods and Funhouse Massacre that Death House failed to capture.
That's really all the movie is, the way it's shot is very sterile and straight-forward like a boring training video of what it's like to work in the Death House in the most boring ways possible, even worse most of the footage used in the movie is shot like it was Behind-the-Scenes featurettes the director thought would work as legitimate story-footage making it a more awkward and bad experience that takes you out of the whole thing.
The action scenes are so boring to look at that are poorly-executed (and I thought the fight scenes in my movies were iffy) and the death scenes you don't really get to see that much of due to poor execution and the effects work being very weak in most places, the only death scene that made me grin a bit was one where two male nurses get impaled in the back by meat hooks and another scene where the main characters encounter a room full of horrifically gory skinless zombies that eat flesh and talk about how crazy they are that were far more interesting I wish the movie was just about them but too bad they're not the focus.
So if the visuals are bad, the effects are bad, surely we might get more out of performances right? HAHAHAH!!! Fuck no! You fucking idiots! Nothing can save this movie from being the terrible joke that it is! To be fair, I do love Tony Todd, Bill Moseley and Dee Wallace's performances in the movie, the rest of the cast old or new either have little to no lines that you either don't care about them existing or the acting is just fucking god-awful and so boring to watch, they're forgettable and it makes you wonder why the fuck they have anyone playing these roles if they're not going to be better utilized and drive the story?
Kane Hodder was top billing for this movie and yet I know nothing about his character to be afraid of him, he's a good actor as well as a stuntman too! A very lovely man, and much like all the horror veterans in this movie his talent is under-utilized and has nothing to him, no character has anything to them, the two federal agents having dark pasts still makes them boring and uninteresting to the point of anger, that's how bad it is.
Anything that can possibly go wrong, Death House makes it far more worse than you can expect it to. I'm sure Gunnar Hanson meant well when he came up with the story for it, but even if it was suppose to be for fun there is NOTHING fun in the movie whatsoever, it's joyless and sad and pathetic, it just looks like a train wreck where most of your favorite horror actors are relegated to such forgettable and worthless roles given nothing to work with they feel like a waste to anyone's time, it's like going to a horror convention where you feel weird paying for autographs to just talk with your favorite horror filmmakers and how old and desperate they are and fail to cover it up which is just depressing.
Whoever thought making this movie a memorial to Gunnar Hanson, just fuck off, just fuck right off.
Death House is far worse than people says it is, even those that say it's bad yet might have some redeeming values are FOOLING themselves to give even the slightest bit of levity to this soulless piece of cinematic shit. This movie is an EMBARRASSMENT to the horror community and why a lot of people look at the horror genre as a fucking joke, even worse for those who make independent art who can do soooo much better.
If there's any way to fix this, someone get somebody with shit loads of money and a passion for filmmaking and horror movies and make a REAL horror movie with ALL the horror icons surviving today with the following people:
Robert Englund
Kane Hodder
Tony Todd
Doug Bradley
Brad Dourif
Doug Jones
Dee Wallace
Barbara Crampton
Jeffrey Combs
Udo Kier
Reggie Bannister
Andrew Divoff
Linda Blair
Ken Foree
Bruce Campbell
Kurt Russell
Keith David
Heather Langenkamp
Stephen Geoffreys
Corey Feldman
Thom Mathews
John Saxon
Joe Pilato
Meg Foster
Alice Cooper
Giovanni Lombardo Radice
Chris Sarandon
Bill Moseley
Sid Haig
Michael Berryman
Felissa Rose
Jamie Lee Curtis
Malcolm McDowell
Rutger Hauer
Ron Pearlman
Cassandra Peterson
Lyn Lowry
Danny Trejo
Juliette Lewis
Salma Hayek
With special monster/makeup/gore effects by Greg Nicotero. Make it into a horror anthology or just one big horror movie and get all sorts of new and old horror writers/directors who know what they're doing.
Mick Garris can make a better movie than this!
Death House gets a big fat 2/10 from me, worse movie of 2018...skip it...it's not even so-bad-it's-good quality, go watch the new Halloween instead.