Review #82: Hell House LLC (2015)


This review was originally written in October 2019.

October Horror Movie Review #30: Hell House LLC

Yipee. Another found-footage movie that has zero confidence in its own premise.

Let me start this review by saying something infuriating about this film: It starts off as a documentary about a "tragedy" that happened at Hell House, a haunted house attraction in a small town. I put the word "tragedy" in quotations because this movie is so frustratingly vague about its own inciting incident- at no point do they ever give you enough information to be interested in the mystery. Instead, they show several people interviewed as saying, "What happened there? I have no clue" and "You watch the video. YOU tell ME what happened."

This video they're referring to (as we see in full) is of a typical customer on opening night of this haunted attraction, going from room to room with all of the other customers, until they get to some stairs, at which point a bunch of people start screaming and everyone runs back outside. That's... the entire video. They keep building it up as this mysterious, unexplainable event (even AFTER we've seen it), but what was so mysterious about it? People got scared and ran outside. How am I supposed to tell YOU what happened at Hell House by watching this video when the video shows absolutely nothing? It took me reading the IMDB summary of the movie to even find out that some of the customers died in the "Hell House Incident"- was I supposed to be curious about some sort of mystery here? If so, why not tell me about the mystery, filmmakers?

I just can't get over how slipshod this premise is. They spend almost literally the entire movie telling us about how the Hell House Incident was "so mysterious" and "so unexplainable" but they never actually tell us anything about what happened there. And- no surprise here- when we finally DO see what the filmmakers are willing to show us (that is, by the end of the film)- there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING UNEXPLAINABLE ABOUT IT. The way they spent the whole rest of the movie talking about how "mysterious" and "unexplainable" and "YOU tell ME" this incident was, I was expecting a portal to have sucked a bunch of people into hell, or someone accidentally NoClipped through a wall, or Amelia Earhardt showed up and took everybody hostage, or SOMETHING UNEXPLAINABLE. Instead, you know what happened? A bunch of people in cloaks showed up and then the video got all glitchy. That's.... literally all it was. I guess they killed some people too? But we didn't get to see that.

I could probably talk about the plot but the actual plot of the movie has seemingly nothing to do with this "mysterious" "unexplainable" "Hell House Incident". A group of friends buy an abandoned Bed & Breakfast and turn it into a haunted house. On the way, some spooky stuff happens, also supposedly the previous owner killed himself in the house. It spends over an hour setting that much up. Then we're back at the end, chronologically, dealing with the aftermath of this "mysterious" and "unexplainable" incident. (Which, again, was just a bunch of people running out of a haunted house, maybe from some people in cloaks. That's all.)

The problem is, the writers had so little confidence in their premise they knew there was no way they could give out a single iota of information about it without the audience laughing and walking out of the theater. They assumed that if they repeated how scary, and mysterious, and unexplainable this event was, then maybe their audience would think it actually was any of those things when they finally showed some random people in cloaks later on.

This movie does nothing good. It does nothing original. There's one or two actually creepy moments but I'm inclined to think those were flukes more than anything else. Whoever made this film should be ashamed of themselves, and the fact that this movie has a sequel is far more mysterious and unexplainable than anything that actually happened in it.

Overall Rating: 1/10

My Wish For All Filmmakers: Please learn how digital and analog film works, and stop acting like it's all the same stuff

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