mokienatrix

Jerky skepticism kicks things off, but characters quickly start jumping to conclusions so they can explain to viewers a story that isn't actually happening on screen.

This is not a slow burn. This is a no-burn that treads water until the final 15 minutes, then decides to go out bloody in lieu of plot.

I enjoy low budget films with a great concept and lofty ambitions, but this just sits on its concept, not bothering to develop an actual story, as if the writer/director thought the idea itself was 'deep' enough to carry 93 minutes. There's a brief attempt at interpersonal drama at the beginning that falls flat and is forgotten almost immediately, a whiff of subplot the film remembers to get back to once or twice that looks and feels like an afterthought (budget: three potatoes), and some in-camera special effects that should probably come with a flashing lights warning.

What it doesn't have is tension or anything resembling scares. I don't mean jump scares - I mean ANY scares. The only moment of horror is near the very end, in a closet, which I'm pretty sure it was unintentional.

The performances are good, though.

By which I mean the kind of French sci-fi/fantasy the magazine specialized in, where basking in the visuals was half the point and everything seemed to be saturated in a kind of sexuality that was strange to US readers, without the hang-ups than we're used to in our own horny genre works.

So it won't be everybody's cup of tea, obviously. It may be more enjoyable to approach it as an art film, instead of trying to chase the plot - just let its retro French weirdness wash over you and enjoy it for what it is, instead of trying to predict it or demand standardized storytelling from it.

I would have added a star if the tourist had died before the half-way mark. The movie wants him to have a redemption arc so bad, but in warping the film to cater to its worst character, it cheats all the other characters.

And another star if it hadn't saved all of its zombies for the last five minutes. There was no sense of threat for much of the film - just four people walking around in the woods for days (according to the overlay text), apparently without food, water or shelter, one having had his appendix cut out with a broken bottle, and nobody looked even a bit tired or septicemia-ish.

At the halfway mark, I would have said it's not the worst thing I've ever seen, just the kind of low-budget film Syfy has been actively copying for years. (Their 'ironic B-movies with a better budget' may have poisoned the well in regards to expectations of actual and earnest B-movies.) But incredibly enough, in the last half hour, the acting got worse (yes, really) and the film lost the thread on what little plot it actually had.

Quickly: the cover art has nothing to do with the film or story, the 'dustwalker' appears for half a minute as a deus ex machina at the end of the movie, and the attempt to science up this fiction with zombie ant fungus doesn't make sense and goes nowhere.

Less quickly: this never feels like more than eight people being overdramatic about a couple of guys spacing out and then underreacting when they actually kill someone. The film tries to project a small town scale through dialogue about rapidly spreading infection and lots of uncontrolled violence, but it doesn't track with the one-horse ghost town on screen. Any creepiness achieved by the infected staring and waiting for their specific target wears off real quick when the film can't decide if they can open doors or not. Sometimes yes! Sometimes no! Sometimes yes AND no!

It also doesn't help that anyone who isn't their specific target can walk up and start a conversation beside them about how odd they're acting, which happens over and over, before the movie pretends they're fast zombies and everyone has to hide from slow-but-fast jumping zombies that don't actually chase them, and board up windows that already have a metal grate on them while other folks hide in plain sight behind plate glass shop windows and nobody ever locks a single door.

If you don't believe the reviewers, believe your own eyes: Google "H.H. Holmes hotel" and scroll through the photos, newspaper drawings, and recreations of the actual building. Compare that to what was chosen as cover art - apparently a building chosen at random after Googling 'murder castle'.

That's the attention to detail and accuracy you're dealing with here.

Don't give this thing eyeballs.

You'll probably enjoy this more if you're open to cheeseball horror-comedy. It isn't a cheeseball horror-comedy - not quite - but it definitely plays better if you can roll into that mindset, and might have been a better movie if it were.

I sat through the first hour thinking this was a good premise marred by bad decisions. The dialogue is clunky, there are plot holes, Officer Cliché's unnecessary sideplot is a whole mess, characterization is all over the place, what are motivations anyway, etc.

But then that reveal hits, and I cackled with utter delight through the last 20 minutes. I would gladly watch the whole thing again with friends to watch them when that moment arrives, which makes it a good enough film for me despite the aforementioned flaws.

Your ability to enjoy this may depend on whether you can get past the distracting acting and accents. UK actors trying to swallow their accents and affect American mannerisms somehow managed to come across as vaguely Scandinavian, which is weird, and all the dialogue has bizarre issues with cadence that leave performances feeling very 'off'.

As a fan of the podcast, I was looking forward to this show. Unfortunately, changes to the character and plot for the sake of generating extra AMC-style drama nearly derail the mystery itself - making Lia a skeevy basketcase does more to distract from the story than to translate it to TV.

It's obvious that a lot of viewers love this as a bit of campy fun, and I wish I could join them, but to me it was simply an hour-plus of extremely dated pop-culture in-jokes I don't have a frame of reference for - maybe something lost when Hollywood shifted from Gothic ambiance to monster movies?

In any case, I'm told it's a poke at the Gothic horror genre as a whole, but I couldn't shake the feeling of it as a pointed parody of a film I'd never seen.

When Duncanville is doing its own thing, and remembers its own premise, the banter and stories land fine. It trips itself up when it goes try-hard copycat.

It often feels like the writers' room is intentionally mining other shows and fumbling through their drawers to try and replicate their formulas. For instance, randomly in an episode, the show will try its hand at some MacFarlane-esque rapid-fire surreal pop culture references, and mid-season, out of nowhere, it decided it hates its resident teenage girl.

This isn't simply South Park's "The Simpsons did it first" problem, because it's not that Duncanville is just covering old territory - it feels like it wants to wear the Family Guy and Simpsons' skin, Silence of the Lambs-style, as a short-cut to becoming an established show without the work of actually establishing its own vibe over time.

I'm seven episodes in and still waiting for it to actually be a show about 'an average kid who dreams of making it big without having to wear a suit and tie to do so,' instead of a show about a kid who stands around being a foil for aging Gen X parents who turned out to be easier for aging Gen X writers to write for and shoehorn into rehashed Simpsons season umpteen scenarios.

A good (and depressing) movie if you want to sit and ponder the futility of everything, but not so great if you're just seeking a Saturday night scare-fest. That's a problem, because it's terribly mis-marketed - the cover and blurb pitch this as a slasher film when it's definitely not.

The film raises a philosophical question for viewers to chew on: does anything we do ever matter if everything we do will be forgotten almost as soon as we're gone? (One character even spells this out as he tries to leave a mark that can't be erased.) The horror here isn't a killer that can be defeated, a monster that can be escaped, or a conspiracy that can be unraveled and explained away, but the inevitable fact of death and our own eventual irrelevance, the fear of being erased by time. Like a post-modern danse macabre, each character acts a symbol (of evil, of family, of education, of religion, etc.), though it's disturbing to wonder if our sympathies would fall differently with a bit less B-movie scripting and a bit more A-list acting.

I didn't particularly mind the open ending or the lack of explanations, because the question the film is poking us to think about has no objective answer. I doubt any concrete explanation the film could have cooked up would have worked without undermining that central question and turning the film into the straightforward slasher the cover advertises.

Horror sequels are generally lazy attempts to cash in on a popular film's name, but "Return to House on Haunted Hill" hits a low that most franchises don't dip to until the fourth or fifth installment.

After using a paper-thin premise to get a new lot of victims (complete with Geoffrey Rush and Famke Janssen wannabes) into the murderous house, the film dispenses with all attempts at characterization or suspense-building. Instead, it cuts straight to overacted deaths, lesbian ghosts, Mexican standoffs, and dialogue so bad hitting "mute" improves the film.

Unfortunately, the money saved on screenwriters was not spent on special effects. Where the original film had half-seen figures jerkily moving across a screen in ways people don't, this has curvy girls in Halloween face paint that wouldn't have passed muster in 1982, pretending to be turned on and overcaffeinated.

Upside: no 'cat scares.' Downside: no other scares, either.

The filmmakers have no clue how to build tension by teasing viewers with hints and threats and things unseen, and instead just throw terrible effects on the screen every couple of minutes, or jump around to black-&-white footage of what they think passes for back story.

Don't buy it. Don't watch it. For the love of all that is horror, don't encourage these hacks.