FilmSnobReviews

Title: House On Willow Street
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Director: Alastair Orr
Starring: Carlyn Burchell, Gustav Gerdener, Sharni Vinson
Runtime: 1 hr 30 mins

What It Is: Alastair Orr direct this horror starring Carlyn Burchell and Gustav Gerderner. A gang of kidnappers – Hazel (Sharni Vinson), Ade (Steven John Ward), Mark (Zino Ventura) and James (Gustav Gerderner) abduct Katherine (Burchell), taking her to an abandoned warehouse. Before long, however, the kidnappers realize that they have made a poor choice in this particular abduction, as Katherine reveals a monstrous power and one by one exacts her revenge on her captors.

What We Think: It’s not easy being a kidnapper, you spend months of planning, then there’s the tenuous trust you must place in your cohorts and one wrong slight error can lead to prison or death. Or further still, it could be far worse, the person you abduct is actually a demon in human skin.  The four crooks kidnap Katherine with the expectation that her parents will pay handsomely for her safe return however they soon realize she doesn’t look too well and our wannabe captors start to ponder if they have actually done her a favor by rescuing the girl from some bad situation.

This is especially true as Katherine advises them that they have messed up and should let her go immediately but the pull of the monetary reward is too great and so when the ransom calls they attempt are ignored they decide to go back to Willow Street to discover both parents dead and also the two corpses of two priests and this is where the ‘fun’ begins.

The film then just becomes a mess of repetitive and annoying flashbacks, we are never once told why the hell they are even kidnapping her, in terms of introduction there is none! Two minutes in and they are on a mission to kidnap this girl for reasons which are not explained well at all.

The film is dark and I mean literally dark, it spends most of the time in the warehouse and you can barely see what is going on, it feels cobbled together and the most exciting part of the film was when I had to pause it when I got cramp in my leg, that feeling was so much more interesting than anything the film had to offer unfortunately. The dialogue was laughable, I remember a line where one of the captors says, “No one is afraid of the dark” (when they have to go to the basement to change a bulb) and his compatriot turns and with a straight face and says, “maybe you should be”. Even at that point, I was urging the demon to kill all four of them so I could turn it off and get to sleep but unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky.

It was in no way scary or moving, it made you jump a few times but it just used the same old riffs, the same old clichés to achieve its shocks, I am a huge horror fan and this is not even average. Additionally, the film’s length was a major issue, it dragged so much, once the initial revelation was made we were just then left with the aforementioned repetitive incidents where characters are left on their own to deal with nightmare visions and hallucinations as the demon got into their minds.

Finally, just by turning the volume up when there is a loud bang it thinks that this somehow adds to our tensions, it does not at all and for me it’s just a cheap way of getting a scare and a cheap way to build fear, it’s a shame it had to resort to this. I did not care about anyone in the film and frankly, if they all killed themselves after twenty minutes it would have got a C from me but as it is I have no choice to award this our lowest possible score here at filmsnobreviews.com

Our Grade: F, The film is total crap – there is nothing else to say, I hated it so much. They could be a little something for the genre fans possibly but I would seriously avoid this like the plague – stay indoors, stay safe, don’t answer the phone, don’t drink the tap water.. AVOID.