i enjoyed this ,better than most horrors that contain some found footage, sound and acting were good. only downside is that the opening night scene is very difficult to make out whats happening.
shareNone of the scenes were really that easy to make out, tbh...That said, I really liked this FF ... Most are junk, this one was pretty good.
shareThis was pretty good. And I agree with you, it's downfall is not being too clear about what was happening on opening night.
American Horror Story Season 6: Donald Trump
I agree. HH was scary and effective. It had a high creepy-to-gory factor, and there were moments that stuck with me. I thought the acting was quite good, too. Also, given what must have been a very low budget, the set and props were well done. The movie seems to have been filmed at an actual haunted house tourist attraction in Lehighton, PA:
http://www.waldorfestateoffear.com/index.html
I took a look at the address on google street view, and I think that's the place. Probably filming off season in such a location wouldn't be very expensive.
It's true that the events on opening night were hard to see but, IMO, pretty easy to figure out if you put together the various clues left earlier in the film.
I did think there were a couple of problems:
1. Minor flaw: They didn't explain very well why Paul was constantly filming. There was a brief line about using the footage as guidance for the following year, but it came during an exchange when it wasn't clear that Alex (the leader) was being entirely truthful. I'm used to this kind of thing and accept it as going with the territory in FF, but they could have tried harder
2. Bigger flaw and SPOILER: The backstory, which is important in FF because films in that genre depend on a sense of reality, was sorely lacking. There should have been more information about the hotel and its owner; what they gave us didn't hold together well. (For example, Tully, the man who supposedly built the hotel, hanged himself in 1989, but the building is obviously much older than that.) An even bigger problem was the lack of explanation for what was up with Alex. There was obviously something going on, something he was hiding. When we are finally about to hear the story, the camera cuts to static and then returns when the story has been told. That's a big, big cheat IMO. I expected an end note with an explanation - like Alex turning out to be descended from the owner or one of the victims or something like that - but there was nothing.
This was done, I think, to answer the age-old horror movie question, "why didn't they just leave?" However, it's cheating to tell the audience there's an explanation but then hide it from them.
These flaws did not spoil HH for me at all, but it would have been a stronger film if the filmmaker had been more careful and detailed about the backstory.
Still very much worth seeing if you are a FF fan.
I agree that it was a pretty solid film but there were some major flaws.
SPOILERS BELOW.
For one - how convenient that it's never explained why they "can't leave." Alex has clearly done something, but no one comes out and says it. It's just dumb, especially since the loyalty to Alex is never explained or even explored
Two - Paul disappears, they pick up his camera in the room, and NO ONE THINGS TO CHECK THE FOOTAGE???? Seriously? That's just such a terrible plot hole and contrivance that it drops the movie's overall rating significantly.
Three - They're doing research for the movie but somehow think that Sarah survived? Going to the house and then even opening the door after they know they shouldn't are standard horror movie "how dumb are you" tropes, but the suspension of disbelief to put the whole thing in place is a bit much.
Overall it's about a 6 - it's a great premise, there are a good number of earned scares, and for the first hour it establishes a real atmosphere of dread... unfortunately, like all too many modern horror films, it fumbles to a climax and we're left thinking what could have been.
SPOILERS:
Agree it was an odd decision not to explain what position Alex had actually put the company in so that Tony felt he had no choice but to stay. My personal theory is that Alex and HH LLC were in desperate financial straits, possibly having to do with something that happened back in Queens (there's some miniscule potential hints during the drinking scene at the bar) and unless this haunt was a success the company would have to fold.
Alongside that is Alex clearly knows way more about the hotel's past than he ever wants to let on plus his insistence that the crew documents everything. I think, again for some murky financial reasons, he was secretly, or mostly secretly since Mac knew, making a true life haunting documentary with the rest of the company essentially serving as bait.
Those are just my personal guesses. The decision not to explain what Alex had done was definitely frustrating, though it did add another strange layer of uncertainty to the whole story. It's not what I would have chosen as director but it did provide its own kind of offstage chill as we're kept wondering just what kind of lowdown dirt Alex was willing to pull even though it risked his girlfriend and best friends.
All in all a fun, creepy movie with interesting stuff to talk about, though yep, them not looking at Paul's cam footage was just lame-- and I thought the ghost that got Paul was the mother who had disappeared, and I think there's an easter egg very late in the footage with the daughter popping up briefly too after most of the people had fled/been killed
Your theory makes as much sense as anything, trowsea. Tony was not one of the founders of the company. According to one of the interviews, he and Paul were the first employees hired. You wouldn't expect an employee to be so invested as to risk his life for his employer, but maybe over time he became such a close friend that he could not abandon Alex.
On the other hand, Tony says he can't leave because "Alex screwed us." That suggests that he is a part-owner of the company - which could have happened with long-term employment - and that Alex has bet the company's future on this one venture.
Anyway, as I said after the first time I watched the film, it was indeed a frustrating flaw that the explanation was not just omitted but deliberately obscured. They didn't just skip it. They inserted other video clips during the explanation time. (Maybe those clips contain a clue ...?) The filmmakers made a mistake there, I think.
I hadn't thought of the fact that they didn't look at Paul's footage, maybe because it's so common in FF for people to overlook watching the very footage that would have saved them. It's kind of a trope of the genre, so I'm a bit more forgiving of that than the failure to explain why they can't leave.
Good movie overall, though.
There's a reddit page that discusses some these questions, and the filmmaker answers some of them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/5ibpbd/last_night_i_watched_hell_house_llc_2015_and_its/?sort=new
love this sub-genre. its been a long time since i had a good time watching one =)
http://trakt.tv/users/pedro
http://mooviestats.com/johhnyy/tv/2016/
This was actually the first time I had been creeped out by a film in years!
It wasn't a great film, it had its flaws....But there were some nicely done, highly effective scares!
7/10 from me.