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  THE
HOUSE THAT SCREAMED and HELLGATE: THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED 2 (Sub
Rosa) Horror. 1999/2003. 90/82 min. Both DVDs are Rated 17 by the IDRB.
I
never would have thought before that even the opening credits to a film
could be hokey, but I now know otherwise.
The special effects pretty much simply consist of lots of deviation
between regular film and polarized film, annoying heavy breathing
background noise, and then later in the film, shots of the house where the
camera man zooms in then out, then in then out, and in and out some
more.
In
The House that Screamed, Bob Dennis plays Marty Beck, a writer who
lost his wife and son in a fire. Beck
drives to another town to rent a ‘haunted house’ and live in it while
writing his new horror novel (believing that the house would generate
publicity for the book). Beck,
a disbeliever of the supernatural, soon realizes that the house is indeed
haunted as he begins to experience the spookiness of the house…Things
like sheets draped over chairs standing up on their own, the doorbell
being rung by apparently no one, and a scantily clad woman rolling around,
and borderline masturbating, in Beck’s dreams.
Line after line of corny dialogue accentuates
each of the actor’s horrible dramatic skills that any high school acting
class could easily surpass. There
are pretty big boo-boos in the plot as well, like Beck telling the real
estate agent that he’d like to rent the house for several weeks, but
then on “DAY TWO” already calling his publishing company to ask for
more money in order to stay there longer.
As Beck’s novel is coming along, he also begins
to investigate the hauntings in the house.
He speaks with a man who spent one night in the very house after
his car broke down, only to get creeped out by this guy – who, by the
way, tore out his own eyeballs because of the things he saw while in the
house. Beck then learns from
a ‘friendly’ Civil War soldier ghost in the house that there are many
spirits there, evil beings trapped in the house, who, of course, would
like to do harm to the living.
Best line of the film - spoken by the Civil War
ghost to Beck: “You must
enter the belly of the beast if you wish to understand the house that
screams.” So, following
that advice, Beck smashes a whole in the wall, climbs in, finds a coffin
with himself in it in the basement, and learns that he himself has to
commit suicide within the house in order to free the existing spirits.
Ok then. So you can
tell where this is going: Beck is driven mad by the ghosts, rips his own
eyeballs out – which apparently kills him – and all the evil spirits
are released.
In Hellgate: The House that Screamed 2,
after Beck’s novel mysteriously shows up at the publisher and becomes a
best seller, a college professor and two of his students embark on the
house, this time to study the paranormal activity.
The acting ability of the professor and
student characters is better, but everyone else in the movie is still
horrible. Bob Dennis returns
as the now-evil-ghost Marty Beck, and has glowing red sockets where his
eyes used to be. The dialogue
is forced and awkward, and the special effects are just as bad as in the
prequel. Oh, and there’s another barely dressed ghostly apparition
in part two as well, only this one is much more well-endowed, who also
undulates around a lot and rubs blood on her mouth and bosom while asking
the professor for help.
Beck’s
roll in the house has also changed a bit from the first House That
Screamed. Originally
being the one needed to release the spirits trapped in the house, now he
is a guardian to one of the gates of hell – which, conveniently, is in
that very house. “The house is a doorway to hell. Every door a gateway,
every room a mouth,” Marty growls.
Other amusing lines in the film are: “The
spirits are preventing us from getting in!”
Shouts the professor after the ghosts have locked him and one of
his students out of the house. I would have loved if the student
looked at him and replied, 'Well, duh!'
And…
“I was staring into hell itself!”
Also uttered by the professor, to the glowing eye-socket-ed Beck
after opening the lid to a coffin and staring into a screaming vortex.
As you can imagine both students end up dead in
the house. But then there are
also other interesting surprises, like seeing cob-webbed faced monk-like
figures roaming around, and then finding out that the professor had
already died in a car accident some time before coming to the house.
Beck has to convince him to accept his death and walk into the
coffin (Hell). It’s never
established who the busty ghost is if in the first movie, Beck’s suicide
had released all of the trapped souls, or what the deal was with the
students. Were they already
dead as well? And then too,
the few minutes from when the professor enters the coffin until the end of
the movie are just as unexplainably weird and senseless.
For b-movie lovers, The House That Screamed
and Hellgate: The House That Screamed 2 aren’t any worse than
most of the rest of that genre. But
for mainstream horror fans, these movies should be rented if you are
craving more chuckles than scares. Either
way, if you plan on renting one, rent them both.
You might think after the first one that it can’t get much worse
than that, but in part 2…it does. - Melanie Falina
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