Tonights Halloween viewing courtesy once again from Tubi see’s me and the missus checking out, what can only be described really as a YA haunted house movie that felt aimed at the kind of audience that think ‘The Conjuring’ is too much, but that they’re too big grown up for ‘Goosebumps’.

‘The House of the Witch’ has a similar plotting to ‘Night of the Demons’ in some regards. A group of slightly horned up college teens decide to spend a night near Halloween, having a party at a local haunt spot where allegedly a woman was drowned after being accused of being a Witch. The house, which is borded up, is rumoured to hold the angry spirit of the witch and anyone who enters, never leaves.

Most folks just egg the place, but our teens head up there, begin to party down and make smoochy face, when all of a sudden; things start getting spooky and all the doors lock tight, with no means of escape. It quickly becomes apparent that the folk lore IS true, and with that our teens enter a ‘kill or be killed’ game of survival against a terrifying force with amazing powers.

I’ll be honest, this was kind of middle of the road for me personally, but I could see a younger ‘pre-teen’ audience getting a bit of a buzz from this. Its essentially a bit of an amalgum of haunted house and supernatural horror films from 1985 up to the present day (of 2017) but the key thing here is everythings been softened. Theres genuine horror moments, but they’ve been sanded down a bit to make them less horrifying, blood guts and gore is present, but only in quick cuts and small amounts dotted across the runtime to protect the kids, swearing is reduced to a couple harder swears, but otherwise its ‘Damns’ and ‘Hells’ for most of the runtime.

Basically; this is the movie you put on for kids aged 8-13 or puritanical religious folk who wanna see ‘The HARDCORE stuff’ when you know you cant really show them ‘The HARDCORE stuff’ without causing problems… It gives the illusion of being a harder horror movie, while actually just kind of being quite gentle and a bit more family friendly.

The plot itself is kind of generic, the pacings a little on the slow side, the characters are all horror archtypes from decades passed, the tone is pretty straight cut, but again, aiming more for a teen and pre teen audience so its not THAT straight cut as a horror. The dialogues kind of weak and a bit cheesy in places, it doesnt flow particularly naturalistically. I’d say its a sturdy, but wholley unoriginal work. a good example of the genre, but not the best example of the genre.

The directions pretty by the numbers, I will give Alex Merkin some credit, there are some creative moments here, especially in the more horror driven moments, that I felt were pretty well handled. But ultimately this is just a fairly safe production that isnt here to rock the boat of court controversy. Its here to deliver some ‘mild peril’ and then retreat to the sitting room for cookies and a bible reading.

The cine is actually pretty solid, it has a feint whiff of TV movie vibes to it, compositions and sequence building is pretty solid, again, the more creative moments of this film were fun to catch and on the whole I think it tells the story visually quite well, though there are a few plot gaps that would have been nice to have seen visualised.

The edits pretty tight, but the scores kind of unremarkable. and…Im not going to pick on any one member of the cast here as it looks like a lot of the players are first timers here…But broadly speaking, I didnt care for any of the main characters performances here. theres a range of reasons, some cast members were playing things a bit too theatrical, some seemingly couldnt quite nail the tone needed to play in horror, some got a bit TOO into it which would work if everyone else was doing that, but they wernt…So they just look a bit odd. and there were a couple of performances here that were really just…pretty dire honestly. The performances are probably the weakest element of this film and kind of dragged things down a bit for me honestly.

Ultimately; I couldnt hate this one, its doing a public duty of making accessable horror for people who are either too young or too spooked to watch ‘proper’ horror films and need that halfway house of ‘Spooky enough, but not TOO spooky’ to help give them a foot in the door. Its a nice thing to see, and a bit of a dying art honestly. While its absolutely a flawed production, and I cant really say it does anything TOO out there or distinct to make it stand out. I think it works fine enough for what its trying to do, and I think I could recommend it to parents who have horror kids (though, i’d maybe watch it first just to be on the safe side) who want them to have a ‘grown up’ halloween experience, without having to worry about little Timmy or Timantha recreating scenes from ‘Terrifyer’ or ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ during recess…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/house-of-the-witch/