Dark House

Starring: Meghan Ory, Jeffery Combs, & Ryan Melanger

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars

The fourth time is the charm for the Fangoria Frightfest! The acclaimed horror festival has been a complete bust up until it's fourth film, Dark House. This is a highly imaginative film, with one hell of a twist in the end, and as all of my regular readers know, I love a good twist at the end! Dark House is Walston's newest haunted attraction, featuring state of the art technology, that promises to rattle even the most fearless of people. Aside from the new technology, the big draw for Dark House is that it is the actual house where a ghastly mass murder took place years earlier. Besides it's cool effects, what I really liked about this film was the strong background story that goes along with it. Yes, it does eventually become a gorefest, but it comes after you've been watching a really interesting story for quite some time. As for the gore, it's not what you usually see either, as it's done in a b-movie style. This was really interesting to me, as the attraction features state of the art technology, but the actual murder scenes look like something out of a cheesy 70s film. The stars of the film are mostly newcomers, and as expect some were great, while others need more school, but it's a fairly large cast, so those actors who aren't very good, didn't have much screen time. Dark House will make you jump, make you laugh, and shock you with it's surprise ending. There's a simple plot, that's easy to follow, and an interesting back story for those of us who like to think a little bit. It is really everything I look for in a Horror film and more.