House of Bodies

"You wanna talk about dead girls?" Henry Lee Bishop (Fonda) is a serial killer on death row for a brutal series of murders. The home where he went on his killing spree has been turned into a web based chat house where users can log on and talk to a woman who will reenact murders for them. When the girls in the house begin to actually be killed off Detective Starks (Howard) notices a similarity between the currant murders and the Bishop killings. He questions Bishop about what is going on. For personal reasons I'd rather not get into I have a strong dislike for Peter Fonda so really any movie with him in it automatically has two strikes against it. That being said he is only in this for about 10-15 minutes so that did help. As far as the movie goes it's nothing amazing. It is a pretty cookie cutter horror movie that is pretty predictable the entire time. There is a little twist to make it more exciting but nothing that is totally out of the blue. Your basic watch girls get naked and die movie. It never felt boring or slow but it never really grabbed you and sucked you in either. The best way to describe this is a fluff-horror movie. All of that said the movie is pretty entertaining and that is really what a movie should be after all. Also don't rent it just because Terrence Howard, Peter Fonda and Queen Latifah are in it, they are in it very little. Overall, an entertaining but generic horror movie. I give it a B.

Terrence Howard and Peter Fonda's scenes in the movie is basically one very long interrogation scene split up to parts.

A fairly pointless one may I add as well, where Terrence Howard plays a cop who's interrogating a serial killer played by Peter Fonda about a copycat of his.

It's obvious that all their scenes where shot on the same day in the same location, and that they both did it for the money, and that the producers needed some stars in the movie to attract viewers, and that's the sole reason why they are in the movie.

They aren't bad per se, but if they weren't famous their scenes would have been cut down to a couple minutes, or cut out entirely, hell they'd probably wouldn't have been filmed in the first place to be honest.

The rest of the movie is about the 'House Of Bodies' which is not a haunted place even if that's what it sounds like but a website with 'web-cam-girls' in a apartment complex re-enact murders.

It's really slow, and riddled with plot-holes, and the only reason I didn't absolutely hate it was because one of the web-cam-girls forms a friendship with one of her clients who happen to be a mute.

But yeah the rest of the movie is a tiring peace of work, with overall annoying characters and pointless scenes of people clicking on websites etc etc.

Queen Latifah steps by in a web-chat as a counselor or something to the mute young man, but that's about it.

Despite having some pretty good ideas behind it, this movie was terrible.

Good:

• The setting was interesting. A bunch of cam-girls who live in the house of a serial killer and people can pay to (watch them) act out serial killer-y fantasies. That's pretty unique and adequately creepy. You get to see some gore-y shots of dead girls and related. It had all the elements of a good horror movie...they just were totally misused.

• A few good actors. Terrance Howard and the serial killer dude had good chemistry. The deaf guy and the main girl were fine. Queen Latifah's cameo was well done. She should've played a bigger role though, would've been funny to see her as a main character in a slasher.

• It was shot well enough. Sets were good.

Bad:

• Everything else. The storyline was written in such a disjointed way that it made no sense. It jumped around and was needlessly difficult to follow. You have the main storyline of a guy in the house murdering women which was super generic but decent. Then you have this other storyline with Terrance Howard which had almost NOTHING to do with the main storyline and was used in a way that rendered it completely pointless (way to waste your best actors). From the preview I expected this to be more like Silence of the Lambs, but it wasn't at all. The concept of a dude watching these girls die via webcam was OK, but not executed in an interesting or substantive way. It wouldn't have changed much if that part wasn't even in the movie (sadly, the same goes for Howard). And just when things start getting interesting, the movie prematurely ends with no resolution whatsoever. It felt like the director didn't quite know what type of movie they wanted to make and used elements of several (silence of the lambs, feardotcom, untraceable, etc), but was unable to connect and interweave them.

• Maybe it was just the version I saw, but the sound was abysmal. The music was WAY too loud and all of Howard / killer's dialog was nearly incomprehensible.

• There are also some stupid plot holes like how the kid magically "hacked" and got the power to turn back on in the house / website.

House of Bodies builds itself on a interesting premise, but lacks on execution, revision, and ending. It delivers a bad experience that could have been better because the premise was promising.

The premise is interesting enough to hook you. Recent murders by a copycat of Henry Lee Bishop, a convicted serial killer, seem to close to the source material to be true. This similarity leads detectives Starks and Ramos to confront Henry Lee Bishop.

After this hook, the movie goes downhill.

Let's start with the plot holes, because there are plenty.

So, for whatever unexplained reason, one Tracy runs this business where she hires women to this Big Brother house where they get naked for subscribers and might make some tips. Cam girls, per say. The movie does not explain why Tracy runs this shady business.

Early in the movie, we see that a murdered is at the house and Tracy knows him enough. We also don't get why. By the way, kudos to George Katt's acting throughout the movie.

Then we close in on Kelli, seemingly our protagonist of this beat. She joined the business because she needs money to pay for her college, a fact we get from a lousy call from her mom where the voice interpreter was clearly reading the script emotionless. She is shy and regrets her decision, but, literally seconds later, she gets this private message from Kyle and, out of the blue, she is kinky and in love with Kyle, and vice-versa, which is just unnatural - a plot device to move the story forward.

This Kyle guy is a pro on programming, as we can see from the innumerous Yahoo HTML popping up on the screen - I'm a programmer, so that caught my eye fast. He is so good that he is able to hack into the house's system to restore the power. How? Well, you better just believe the story.

The biggest plot holes for me are the following ones.

Tisha tells Kelli that she is replacing a former girl that died. How? Why? Well, either I got brain damage while watching the movie or the movie didn't explaine why, dismissed the plotline altogether.

The second plotline is pointless. The exchange between detective Starks and Henry Lee Bishop renders itself useless when we see that Starks knows everything, he is just spitting that onto Bishop for whatever. Shame, though, because that's where all the budget went.

House of Bodies could have been a better movie if they had edited the script one more time. Had they filled out the plot holes and improved the ending, we'd get a better story. The way it ended, House of Bodies is a terrible experience.

This movie is amazingly horrifying .. Visualise something as scary as Silence of the lambs set in a Home Alone setup. The horror is intense and at times my heart was so much pounding that I would have died. The acting is top notch and the direction is superb. What adds to the intensity is the excellent background score ....

ABSOLUTE MUST FOR EVERY HORROR FAN !!