DeadHouse (2005)

Directed by Pablo Macho Maysonet IV [Other horror films: The Things They Left Behind (2011), The Red Suit (2014), Fear of My Flesh (2015), Await the Dawn (2020), Tales from the Other Side (2022, segment ‘Scary Mary’] & Brian Rivera [Other horror films: N/A]

I’m an individual who’s seen plenty of lower-budget horror, and while I have a high tolerance of occasionally shoddy film-making, that doesn’t mean I’m oblivious to it when it occurs. DeadHouse is a movie with problems, and while it’s certainly not all bad, I can fairly say it’s far from good.

The story is rather basic – two sisters and a friend have car trouble while traveling, and run awry of some killers who live in a decrepit house. And – well, actually, that’s it. We get a bit of background on the killers, and there’s a very choreographed twist toward the end that I suspect would fool very few people, but then again, not all slashers are dripping in creativity.

And actually, I’ve seen DeadHouse before. A long time ago, Blog Talk Radio was a pretty decent site, and the horror forum Horror Movie Fans (a forum I’ve been of member of since 2009) had a show that I called into plenty of times. During one of those shows, we discussed DeadHouse. Now, that was a long time ago – 2010, if I had to guess – so it’s been around 13 years since I’ve seen this one, and as such, remembered very little of it (not that there was much to remember, truth be told).

If I recall, this used to be on YouTube in full, as I’m sure that’s where I watched it. Nowadays, it seems like it’s a mostly forgotten film, but luckily (such as it is), I own a copy on the 50-movie set Catacomb of Creepshows. Though I don’t care for the film overall, I am glad to have access to it, as it seems a rather difficult film to find online nowadays.

In all honesty, there’s not a whole lot to say about this one, though. The story’s rather simple, but it fails due to technical aspects, primarily the audio. The audio here was really bad – there are multiple conversations that I can’t understand at all, because it seems there was no microphone in the vicinity. Other times, the music plays over the dialogue, and little-to-none of the characters’ voices actually stand out. I’ve seen movies with poor audio before, but the consistently poor audio of this film was almost astounding.

Otherwise, you have occasionally decent (though rather low-budget) effects. Someone gets stabbed with a pitchfork, which was probably the best scene. Another gets their head slammed into a wall, causing said head to explode. Someone’s body gets slammed into a tree, causing their spine to crack. None of the deaths are that memorable, but at least they’re here.

I thought the performances were alright. Keep in mind, I couldn’t hear them a fifth of the time, but that’s not their fault. Tracey Dalton and Cara Dalton played believable sisters (and given their shared surnames, I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually were sisters). Pablo Macho Maysonet IV (also the director of this film) had some occasionally amusing dialogue, but was mostly whateves. Brian Rivera had a friendly persona, and Anthony Carvalho (who isn’t even credited on IMDb at the time of this writing) was fine too. None of the performances here did much, but at least they averaged out okay.

The story, though, didn’t feel fresh enough to me. I didn’t care for the twist at the end, and given the garbled and difficult-to-understand dialogue, it was a bit of a rough one to get through, made only marginally easier by the fact I was able to rope my brother into watching this one with me (shout-out James, wherever you are brah). It’s not a good movie, and while there are certainly worse out there, never doubt that there aren’t thousands of better ways to spend your time.

4/10