Category Archives: Movie Review

I first learned of Haunter (2013) when I saw it listed on Netflix Streaming. I did a bare bones/spoiler-free search online to see if it was well-received and was surprised to see a lot of positive buzz about it. Once I saw that people liked it, I stopped researching it because-as usual-I wanted to be surprised. I also wanted to watch it at the right time so I ended up waiting several weeks until I could give it the attention it deserved. The BF joined me and I have to say, we were both very pleased.

I will insert a disclaimer here that while I generally try and keep my blog posts spoiler-free, to describe the main plot of Haunter, I really need to explain some of the “twist” part of the movie. I don’t necessarily find this to be a spoiler as the viewers learn this twist 20-30 minutes into the movie, but if you want to be surprised like me on my first time through the movie, don’t read any further.

We first see main character Lisa as she is waking up. Her younger brother is calling her on his walkie-talkie. She wake sup and goes on about her life as a typical, angsty teenager. She snaps at her mother about the laundry and later has an uncomfortably silent dinner with her family. Tomorrow Lisa wakes up to the exact same day. And each day on, she becomes slightly more aware of her family’s situation, that everyone is dead and they remain in this limbo time-loop, reliving the same day over-and-over again.

As brief as that synopsis was, I don’t really want to go into more plot detail to preserve the direction of the story for readers who do want to be surprised. I will say there’s contact with the present day teen living in the house, a disturbing invisible friend relationship that Lisa’s younger brother Robbie maintains, and a visit to the house by a creepy maintenance man, and the realization that the family cannot physically leave the home.

Overall Impression:

One criticism I have of the movie is what happened between 1985 and the present day? We encounter pre-Lisa victims from the 1940s onward to modern day teen, Olivia, so there’s definitely a trend here. But yet there’s no explanation of the time after Lisa’s family lived in the home. Perhaps the house sat vacant? Maybe a family without children lived in the home? I don’t know but a casual acknowledgement of this would help strengthen the plot for me.

Another minor criticism is this was not my favorite Abigail Breslin performance. She seemed a bit checked-out throughout the duration of the film. The unique plot was enough to secure a high rating from me, but if Breslin was more emotionally invested in this, the film would have scored bigger.

Other audiences report that the movie doesn’t feel 80s enough, specifically Lisa’s hair and the fashion choices of the other characters. I think a hyper-stylized 80s setting would have distracted from the story line so I am fine with how the decade was depicted.

Ultimately, Haunter really surprised me, held my interest, and delivered a modern take on my favorite horror sub-genre, the haunted house/ghost story. I’m surprised it didn’t make it into theaters because I think it would’ve done well. If you’re looking for something fresh, this is for you.

Pros: modern, unique take on the ghost story
Cons: acting felt wooden, some plot holes

Mashup status: Think Groundhog Day (1993) meets American Horror Story: Season 1 (2011) and The Others (2001) with a nod to Beetlejuice (1988).

Rating: 8.5/10

Not a bad looking cover, but I was tired of looking at it so I wanted to go ahead and watch this so I could delete it from my queue.

This is yet another Netflix movie that I saw knowing nothing of the plot. I put it in my queue ages ago, based purely upon the mediocre star rating (which mediocre star ratings on Netflix for horror movies are usually an indication of a decent movie). I finally got myself in the right mood to watch a marginally unknown cast deliver try and deliver some horror on a slim budget.

House Hunting  begins with a split story, following two separate families as they are searching for a new house. Family #1 consists of husband Charlie, teen daughter Emmy, and new wife Susan. Family #2 consists of husband Don, teen son Jason, and matriarch Leslie. During the day’s home searching activities, both families encounter a peculiar man. This man turns out to be the seller of the same house that both families roll up to at the same time. An aside, I recall how awkward it was when I was house hunting once, and another family stopped to look at the house at the same time I did. There was an odd, darting of the eyes, uncomfortable stand-off of who liked the house better, was the other party interested, etc. I digress.

So both families get to the remote home at the same time and discover the house is abandoned. The families encounter a severely traumatized young woman running through the woods, who they discover has had her tongue cut our and she cannot speak. The families drive away from the house in an effort to get this young woman some aid, however they are unable to leave as the road keeps taking them back to the house. After all afternoon of trying to escape, they families concede and retreat inside the home.

At this point, the movie turns into a psychological standoff between the families; both fathers are pretty overbearing. And slowly the families unwind…going crazy having to stay put in this house for days and then weeks. Predictably they have to face their inner demons. While there are some supernatural elements, including a few out-of-place ghost cameos,  House Hunting is mostly a psychological thriller.

Overall Impression:

If this was the first horror movie I’d seen to utilize the “twist” cyclical concept, then I would have given House Hunting a better rating. There are just far better executed of these types of films, which I am hesitant to list because if you know the other movies like this, then there is no twist. So I will do you a kindness and discreetly list them here behind a strike-through: Dead End (2003), Triangle (2009), Timecrimes (2007), The Butterfly Effect (2004), The Machinist (2004), and Donnie Darko (2001)

Ultimately House Hunting was very slow-paced, a little boring, obviously low-budget, but it did have an interesting idea (although this idea is not exactly novel to modern thriller cinema). The acting fell flat for me as well. In fact, I was really distracted by Don (Art LaFleur) in the trivial sense that to me, he will forever be Silver Fox from 1995’s gem of a teeny-bop movie Man of the House (JTT!!).

Pros: unique, twist, thoughtful plot
Cons: tried to be too many things, slow/tedious, low-budget, wooden acting, unlikable characters

Mashup status: See strike-through above for spoiler list of similar movies.

Rating: 5.5/10

I somehow managed to go nearly 30 years without viewing this gem. As a child, I remember the Sorority House Massacre VHS cover in the rental store and thought it looked pretty menacing. An aside, I first began watching scary movies as a young girl, mostly enjoying USA’s Up All Night and TNT’s Monstervision weekend B-movie series. So I rarely actually checked movies out from the rental stores until I was older. But when my dad and I would peruse the stores after school, I would usually wander off into the horror section and admire the glorious 80s cover art. I digress…

When I saw this cover posted in Netflix, I instantly remembered it from when I was a child and realized I had never actually watched it and added it to my queue. I didn’t let it hang out there for long and sat down to watch it the following weekend.

Much like a lot of great 80s cover art, the depiction is misleading. It isn’t about a rogue, sex-crazed maniac who has carefully selected a sorority house full of scantily-clad, defenseless chicks. But rather, the film revolves around Beth, a doe-eyed college student who is checking out a campus sorority to see if she wants to become a member. Through flashbacks and  scenes at a local psychiatric hospital, we learn that as a child, Beth’s brother Bobby slaughtered their entire family, but was captured before he could kill Beth.

Beth doesn’t remember any of this, and the audience doesn’t officially learn all of this backstory until later in the movie. But the allusions are clear so there’s really no surprise. It’s also not surprising when Bobby escapes the mental hospital and treks back to his childhood home, which is now the campus sorority house.

I will end this relatively vague plot summary here and note that Sorority House Massacre is extremely predictable, but is still fun. The sorority sisters aren’t “naughty” and we only see a smidge of nudity here and there, mainly when the sisters are getting ready for class. And I’m a girl so I can say this, but at no point during my college career-and I lived in the dorms for all 4 years-did I shower or change freely amongst my roommates. So this is just another little silly yet completely characteristic of the B-movie slasher.

One thing I’d like to add is that I saw this very close to when I first watched the remake of Black Christmas (2006). This is worth bringing up because unless you watch Sorority House Massacre before the Black Christmas remake, then you’ll most likely find yourself comparing the two throughout the viewing of Sorority House as I did. The similarities are glaring, especially regarding the sorority house being the former location of a mass murder and the killer has escaped from a mental hospital to hunt down a family member.

Of note, Sorority House Massacre is also frequently compared to Halloween (1978). I don’t disagree with that statement, but to me, Sorority House feels more like the Black Christmas remake. Sorority House obviously pre-dates the Black Christmas remake so I don’t hold at fault for Sorority House for having such a similar concept. I doubt you will encounter the same similarities with the original Black Christmas (1974) because it does have a different story than Black Christmas (2006)/Sorority House Massacre.

Overall Impression:

There are a little too many conveniences for me to rate this any higher than a 7-like how Beth mystically finds her way to the sorority house that happens to have been her childhood home. And that Bobby would know his sister is there, or that he would even know how to get back to the house after all those years. But part of the cheese of Sorority House Massacre is B-rated charm so this is relatively easily overlooked.

The dream sequences were pretty spooky. There was an eerie scene with the family sitting around the dining table; they looked like mannequins and then blood began dripping from the chandelier. There was also some decent yet tame kill scenes. These scenes weren’t graphic but the gore felt unique (a little reminiscent to me of the Italian giallo style).

Pros: fun, classic B-movie 80s slasher
Cons: silly-not genuinely scary, felt too similar to other horror classics, bad acting

Mashup status: Ancestrally speaking, this is the child of Halloween (1978) and the aunt of Black Christmas (2006) with most every cliched 80s B-movie horror gimmick you can think of.

Rating: 7/10