Hellhouse LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel [5.5 out of 10]Continues from the first without a lot of evolution and the drawing out of it's ideas feels less effective than when it was more cryptic. The news media exploration angle is an good framework taking cues from the 'story about a story within a story' structure of the first but handled with less ambience. The sequel is more fast oaced feeding disappearance after disappearance into the house, maybe to a point it belittled buildup. The first was just familiar enough but used tropes in a complicated enough way mixing haunting and Halloween and eerie to still feel fresh; here it's starting to feel more like Hell House 1.5 with reminders of other movies (like Ringu). Here some of the 'footage' starts to feel too much like vignettes belaboring an already established mythos. The budget of these films versus the ambition feels a little more obvious now that it's premise is more spelled out; I wonder if they will be able to deliver more than increasingly more obvious teasing in future installments. Brian Tracy does well as a town elder who infuses a lot of cautionary menace into the rile. I had a good time because I'm a sucker for horror but some of the production values make it feel campy.
Hellhouse LLC III: Lake of Fire [4 out of 10] Awkwardly closes out some of the plot in a trilogy in an installment that depends too much on rehashing earlier bits. These aren't filma with especially clever plot and work best as creepy images and inference so drawing on the plot seems tone deaf. Even as a lesser sequel there is something triumphant about seeing a bold ambitious indie horror project. There are clip show references to earlier films and and the same clown from the first two films (iconic and over used). I appreciated an attempt to fanservice some resolution to the franchise but found it a bit unsatisfying dashing ambience and the brilliance of the first with a cheesy device that seems a bit out of nowhere. Here there is a new haunted house / stage production but one that seems less ambient and low production, a half hearted ruse of a set up going through the motions. A mogul (hinted at in the second film) Wynn shows up out of the blue seeming to know secrets. This time they introduce a priest and more explicit Christian tropes but in a way that feels too haphazard. The cryptic subtlety of the first or even the knowing meta winks of the second are replaced with a greatest hits montage style slow march to a cheesy hard to understand deus ex machina ending. There were references to the first I enioyed and LoF still musters some creepiness
Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor [6 out of 10]Awkwardly closes out some of the plot in a trilogy in an installment that depends too much on rehashing earlier bits. These aren't filma with especially clever plot and work best as creepy images and inference so drawing on the plot seems tone deaf. Even as a lesser sequel there is something triumphant about seeing a bold ambitious indie horror project. There are clip show references to earlier films and and the same clown from the first two films (iconic and over used). I appreciated an attempt to fanservice some resolution to the franchise but found it a bit unsatisfying dashing ambience and the brilliance of the first with a cheesy device that seems a bit out of nowhere. Here there is a new haunted house / stage production but one that seems less ambient and low production, a half hearted ruse of a set up going through the motions. A mogul (hinted at in the second film) Wynn shows up out of the blue seeming to know secrets. This time they introduce a priest and more explicit Christian tropes but in a way that feels too haphazard. The cryptic subtlety of the first or even the knowing meta winks of the second are replaced with a greatest hits montage style slow march to a cheesy hard to understand deus ex machina ending. There were references to the first I enioyed and LoF still musters some creepiness.
Hell House LLC: Lineage [1 out of 10] Too slow to end on a cliffhanger (and I'm mad about it), Lineage eventually gets good during a final third when it should have been a final act. At it's best there is a forlorn ambience that simmers into a scary encounter in the living room. The best part of Hell House as a franchise is it's easy to root for indie sensibilities and those remain including some modest effects and homegrown acting. Especially early in the film it recycles imagery that felt iconic in the franchise but now feels routine (curiously they dropped an eerie musical beat for a less ominous lyrics only version); it gets scary but there is also some imagery that feels intended more to sort of visually rehash sans continuity elements from earlier films. This installment, like the series, has gotten heavily self referential and offers little jumping on points for newbies - this continuity is refreshingly ambitious but disappointingly executed. The original is a modern classic and when they concluded the third with an ending I disliked it at least felt like there was a direction... but this mythos got distorted in Origins, and Lineage builds on Origins' direction (it feels like there are two lines of explanation that compete now when the best part of 1 was how unexplained it felt). Here pacing is way slow in what feels like a too slow 'what is going on' segment; and with Hell House's convoluted continuity the confusion is understandable (I don't quite understand the significant of the locations even though I think I understand the plot hinges on a young disciple). There is a narrative device that is wonderfully hallucinatory of just showing whatever scenes are of importance to a lead out of context of wherever she is (part of the horror, 'Abaddon Eyes') but this is a cheap narrative device that robs us of buildup in favor of a sort of slode show. There is a key 'blink and you miss it' plot twist reveal that depends heavily on knowledge of characters from III without much setup (even having recently seen the HH films I had to goolge what happened). Lineage could have been much better but I couldnt look away from the franchise. There is a possibility (since the writer/director says this is a final film goodbye to the franchise) that there is an answer in the continuity hidden for one to puzzle out but if so it's awfully cryptic and seems to introduce new threads rather than cure old ones.