Hell House LLC (2016)
Starring Alex Taylor, Andrew McNamara, Tony Prescott, Sara Havel, Paul O’Keefe, Kristin Michelle Taylor
Written and Directed by Stephen Cognetti
Every Halloween season I drive over to New Orleans to attend the city’s two biggest haunted attractions: The House of Shock and The Mortuary. The House of Shock is the more elaborate of the two, but The Mortuary has something else going for it. The building itself is a mansion built in the late 1800s directly next to a cemetery that was converted into a funeral parlor and has long been reported to be an actual haunted house. During the off-season, The Mortuary is rented out for ghost hunting excursions, séances, escape rooms, and other paranormal extracurricular activities. Thankfully, no attendees during the Halloween season when it is transformed into an elaborate multi-level haunt have ever perished at the hands of supernatural forces – at least not yet.
Which brings me to the not-so-lucky haunters of Hell House LLC, a frightfully fun scare-a-thon boasting more shiver and shocks than many actual Halloween haunted house. That even includes The Mortuary of late, to my own personal dismay.
I was lucky enough to attend an early screening of Hell House LLC a year ago at the Fear Fete horror convention. I went in knowing absolutely nothing about it other than it was a found footage movie, which, admittedly, lowered my expectations a bit. To my surprise, it very much exceeded those expectations. You’ll soon get your chance to take a trip into this house of horrors when Hell House LLC arrives on VOD in early November, just in time to completely miss out on this year’s Halloween season.
Seriously, who made the boneheaded call to release this in November? What we have here is a perfect fright flick for the Halloween season, not to mention, a timely one, given a large portion of the scares arrive courtesy of one of the creepiest clowns to appear in a horror movie in a long time. That damn clown elicited numerous gasps and screams at the horror convention I saw it. There was one woman seated in front of me who might still be in therapy because of it.
Adorned in harlequin clothes; bald, with a corpse-like complexion, black lips, and blood-stained tears beneath its eyes, I’ve never been one of those people who consider clowns all that creepy but this guy even got under my skin. A mannequin prop on display in the house, replaced at times by a live performer to jump scare the attendees, the jokes on the staff as something other than them periodically brings it to life, eliciting surprising jolts with little more than a slow turn of the head or changing positions without warning. Sometimes in horror movies, something often forgotten by too many horror filmmakers, it’s the little things, the subtle things, that can make the coldest chills run down your spines, not just the loudest noises as something jumps out directly at the camera. Writer-director Stephen Cognetti gets this and it makes his film work where other similar style films mostly bore and annoy.
Hell House, LLC is one of those new breed of found footage horror films that fashions itself as a faux documentary about filmmakers making a doc about the tragic opening night “malfunction” at a haunted house in 2009. Something went terribly wrong in the basement area as the first group of pay customers made their way through. Chaos erupted; a bottleneck of screaming people fled for the exits only for most to find themselves locked in. By the time first responders arrived and broke down the doors, fifteen people, both patrons and Hell House crew alike, were found dead.
Authorities rules the deaths the result of a “malfunction” and have worked very hard to keep everything about that night hush-hush since. The documentarians out to uncover the truth of that horrific night will discover that the true malfunction was setting up a Halloween spook house in a long abandoned hotel with a history of satanic cults and paranormal activity. The name of the place is the Abaddon Hotel, for crying out loud. These people were just asking for trouble.
To be perfectly honest, based on what I saw of the “Hell House” these folks were putting on, probably for the best the forces of darkness decided to put on a true horror show. Sure, it cost some people their lives and possibly even their mortal souls, but they can’t say they didn’t get their money’s worth.
Hell House LLC might set some kind of record when it comes to found footage movies. The overall feature is presented in the guise of a faux documentary, chronicling both the Halloween tragedy and the haunted history of the location. Cellphone video taken by an opening night customer practically opens the film. The documentarians interview the last member of the crew that put on the doomed “Hell House”, who, in turn, gives them her own never-before-seen video of that night and behind-the-scenes footage of the strange events that occurred leading up to the opening night(mare). The survivor’s footage comprises the bulk of the film, but then the climax shifts ends to the found footage of the people making the documentary going into the cordoned off Abaddon Hotel to see what they can find out, and it’s not spoiling anything to tell you things don’t bode well for them; otherwise, you’d be the one screaming about not getting your money’s worth.
For those keeping score, we have a fake documentary found footage movie that contains two different sets of found footage before itself turning into its own found footage flick. Again, that has to be a record of some kind.
The cast of characters don’t have a ton of depth to them, but unlike say, The Houses October Built (another Halloween haunt movie I was not a particular fan of), I never found myself actively rooting for their demise. Ever noticed that about a lot of found footage horror movies? Characters too often are hateful or downright obnoxious or are required to do the stupidest possible things in order to keep the movie going. Cognetti and company manage to avoid the first two with a likeable cast – even when some are supposed to be irritating, although the final decisions made by the documentarians practically had everyone in the theater I saw it with vocally questioning their intelligence.
Because of that Hell House LLC doesn’t quite stick the landing. On the other hand, that my memories of this movie have stuck with me a year later when so many other horror movies I’ve viewed since have come and gone from my memory banks speaks volumes to what an eerily fun Halloween treat it is.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
