Now you'd figure a haunted house film involving creepy dead
kids beating a living kid to frame the father would be somewhat interesting,
well, it wasn't. It seemed kinda drawn out and was extremely boring.
It relied way too much on jump scares and "oh, look at the shadow cross
in front of the camera" scares. Big fucking deal. The 12 year
old girls sitting behind me were scared, me and my girlfriend were not.
In that sense I suppose it was a good thing they lowered the rating,
otherwise, no one would've liked it.
The ending was very predictable and was fucking horrible.
They could've done so much better with it. *Spoilers* I mean it ends
with them going through a tunnel....fade to black mwahaha *cough*, yeah, great
ending. *End sarcasm* Now for the countdown of scenes and themes taken from
other films.
First off is the most obvious, the whole darkness thing
was done in Darkness Falls(shitty film, but they you have to admit it did
cross your mind when you saw the trailers for this[you could also say Darkness
Falls ripped off the idea from Pitch Black, but I digress]). At the end
of the film they have to keep in the light or else the darkness will get them.
It's been done fellas.
Next, the whole psycho dad in the haunted house trying to get
at the mother and child who are locked in the bathroom is straight from The
Shining. I was just waiting on the guy to break a hole in the door and
say "here's Johnny".
The whole circle of dead bodies thing was done in Blair Witch
Project though slightly different. There was a scene with an old dude
walking down a corridor and the lights started going out that reminded me way
too much of the scene in Session 9 with the kid running from the lights going
out.
There's also a couple minor things like the days being counted
out like in Amityville and an old creepy looking lady crawling on the wall ala
Beastmaster (it's a stretch, I know, but it's there).
There's other stuff I can't remember at the moment, but you
get my point. There wasn't a single moment of originality in this film.
Maybe the uncut version is better, but with all this stuff already in it, I
highly doubt it. Well, I'd love to continue tearing this apart, but I
gotta get to work. All-in-all, I'd say wait till it's out on video/dvd.
