Director: Ted Campbell
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
After his father’s funeral, a man takes his girlfriend back to his childhood home to spend some time there before it's sold with a party involving them and his old friends, but when they start to suspect something dark from his past has returned to seek revenge forces them to stop it from happening.
Review:
This was a fairly fun if somewhat flawed genre effort. Among the best features here is how this one sets about going for a series of supernatural shenanigans to make what’s happening quite surprising and shocking. The main idea of trying to uncover the truth about what happened at the house that gets unlocked while the group is in the middle of their party but aren't aware of the possession that’s starting up to ensure the revenge is complete makes the film come off quite fun once these incidents start to take place. From haunting whispers in their ear, hallucinations involving figures coming to life to attack them, and the eventual realization that the possession has taken place makes everything else that happens in the house come together into a strong series of frantic encounters as the supernatural deaths provide some great cheesy, gory deaths alongside the frantic chasing with the impressive make-up on the possessed. This all gives the film some fine positives to hold it up overall.
There are some big issues with this one holding it back. One of the main factors with this one is the absolutely dire pacing that makes everything feel so dull and boring waiting for something to happen. While the group arrives at the house fairly early and manages to instigate the party soon after, the amount of time spent on this material makes for a dull time waiting on these fairly uninteresting rich people wandering around this large mansion waiting for something to happen to them. The usual outsider who doesn’t fit in with his established group of friends, the rich barely able to contain their contempt for her being of a lower class than she is, and the seemingly obvious secrets that arrive which are fairly obvious to guess what’s going on yet never initiate any kind of panic in anyone. Hardly any of this is interesting and just makes for an overlong start getting this one going.
Once this gets established, the film highlights yet another irritating and common trope with the way this takes place in a realm of untrustworthy friends trying to uncover a dark secret. The way it works is the trope of her not being able to get a hold of the group of friends around her when it's revealed that they’ve been involved in covertly drugging her to throw the idea of her prognosis into question so that the hauntings she keeps trying to bring up have a sense of doubt so that they can keep the horrifying event in their past a secret which only makes everything that happens to her come from a source of disbelieving significant other who treats them like a nervous wreck. It doesn’t make them endearing at all, and combined together make for the factors that bring this one together.
Overview: **/5
A solid enough if problematic enough feature, there’s some fun to be had here even if the flaws do come about quite heavily and leave this one to be a bit underwhelming at points. Those who are fine with this approach or are fans of this kind of style will have the most to like here although most others turned off by these factors should heed caution.
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