Your Acting's Like The End Of The World

What The House Of The Devil Does Wrong.


The House Of The Devil is an homage film. Specifically, an homage horror film. The horror genre is a niche genre. Sure, everybody watches horror films, but horror fans are the sort that will religiously watch almost any horror film that is released. This makes for many difficult sessions - especially since most horror films end up on the bottom shelf as distribution funds are limited unless you're a Saw film or Paranormal Activity - and the quality is often hard to gauge. Reviews do help, but at times a film sits on the fence of whether a film is great or shit. Last year the film Grace was received with as many cheers as it got hisses. This year is The House Of The Devil.


Where Grace was a low budget shlock fest - and a terrible one at that - The House Of The Devil is an old style horror film. Gore is to a minimum, loud noises and jumps are also to a minimum; what is not to a minimum is bad pizza, sleeping, dancing around and knocking vases down and numbing quiet periods of pure nothing. 


The House Of The Devil starts interestingly enough, but when you get to the fifteen minute mark and the most tension you've got is that the pizza is just terrible, you know you're already in trouble. Tom Noonan appears about twenty minutes into the film and provides the most chills for the film - Tom Noonan could read a shopping list and you'd be terrified. So it is detrimental to the film when his character leaves and we're left with the adequate Jocelin Donahue to wander around the house where she is to babysit the absent mother of Tom Noonan. 


She drinks some water. The sink makes an odd noise. She wanders around the house and rudely looks in every room - you're asked to babysit and just asked to sit and watch TV and order a pizza, just do what you're told! She orders a pizza. She dances around to 80's music. She breaks a vase - shock! - and cleans it up. Dances around some more. Watches TV. Turns off the TV. The pizza arrives. 


The pizza man tells her it will be 30 minutes for arrival, and for fillers sake the audience is forced to sit through the 30 minutes that it takes for the pizza to arrive. There are no moments of fright or tension, just waiting and waiting. Why? The film smartly opened with a fact about Satanic cults in the US in the 70's and 80's and after a brief moment of gore in a cemetary about thirty minutes in you wonder what the film actually has to do with Satanic cults at all. 


This is The House Of The Devil's major fault, there is no real tension and no element of fear because there is no plot provided. For eighty minutes of the ninety minute running time of The House Of The Devil the plot goes as follows: girl needs money for house to rent, girl finds job that will pay money for rent, girl and friend of girl go to house to babysit, friend of girl who is more interesting than girl is conveniently killed in House By The Cemetary style, girl faffs about for about forty minutes, girl eats a spiked pizza and wakes up in the Satanic cult section of the film. If Satanic cults scare you, just watch the last ten minutes of the film. 


Essentially The House Of The Devil is all slow burn tension-less build up to a finale which does not make sense whatsoever. It appears that there is a set up to a sequel, but I really am not so sure about that because I honestly have no idea what happened in the final minutes of the film. I did watch it, but it just did not make any sense. When a film like Paranormal Activity was bland but had some effective jumps, it at least felt like a throwback to films from the 80's and it wasn't even trying. The House Of The Devil puts so much effort into the look and style and film stock of the 80's that it fails to maintain an interesting story to hang interesting scares on. 


I honestly don't know how anybody who watches The House Of The Devil could find it scary or that it works as an effective horror film. I have read many positive reviews for the film and all they have done is describe a film which sounds a million times better than the one we're presented with. 


Two haunted houses out of five.