Heeeeyyyy, Horror Nuts!!! Welcome to another WTFHM!
So, this week, I just want to take a moment to cheer loudly…because it’s October! Time for Halloween decorations and roasted pumpkin seeds and…
That’s right! Horror movies! Now, I know you might think that horror movies are an everyday thing for me and they are, but for some reason, Halloween seems to be the one time of year that I’m a little extra when it comes to horror. This is usually around the time that I take on crazy projects and challenges like watching every George Romero zombie movie or every horror movie in a library.
(Incidentally, if you’re going to try the former, you might want to take break halfway through and do something happy like go to a cider mill. Zombie movies aren’t known to be the most joyous kind of movies.)
Great. Now I want cider and donuts.
Anyway, this week’s movie…
House starring…wait…
House starring…No, wait, that’s not right…
Nope, nope. That's not it either...
Okay, there we go. House starring Michael Madsen, Reynaldo Rosales, Heidi Dippold, Julie Ann Emery, J.P. Davis, Lew Temple, Leslie Easterbrook, Bill Moseley, Pawel Delag, Weronika Rosati, and Alanna Bale.
Meet Jack (Rosales) and Stephanie Singleton (Dippold). They hate each other. They’re also driving through the country because Jack wanted to take a shortcut. Where are they going? To see a therapist…who’s clearly in another state or something…which is weird…but okay.
Along the way, they nearly run into a truck that’s driven off the road. Jack talks to the police officer (Madsen) who, in his growly Mr. Blonde voice, informs him of which road he can take to get back to the highway.
Jack and Stephanie, who by the way, hate each other, get into an argument. When they find themselves at a fork in the road – one direction leading to the highway – Jack asks Stephanie if they should even bother. She’s like:
So, he takes the other road…which presumably leads home…though I don’t know why it would as oppose to just taking the highway and going the opposite direction, but, well, anyway.
They’re driving along and they end up hitting some scrap on the road and blowing both their tires. They see another car on the road that appears to have run over some scrap as well. Pay attention, because that’s going to be important later.
They end up at a big, creepy, bed and breakfast mansion. When they walk in, the place appears deserted of course, except for another couple.
They introduce themselves as Randy (Davis) and Leslie (Emery). Randy and Leslie were driving along and ran over some scrap just like Jack and Stephanie.
As they’re talking, the owner of the place shows up:
Betty (Easterbrook). She tells them that the inn is run by herself and her two sons Frank (Moseley) and Pete(Temple) and they might as well settle in because no tow truck is coming to bail any of them out anytime soon.
Okay, so they sit down for dinner and it goes pretty much like you’d expect.
Well, not quite that bad...
Pete creepily tells his mother that he wants to bang Leslie, Frank says some inappropriate stuff about Randy banging Leslie, and…
Yeah, that’s basically the highlights of that scene.
Shortly thereafter, a scary masked man shows up on the lawn. Betty freaks and starts locking doors and windows. Betty’s all, “You brought the Tin Man!”
So, The Tin Man climbs up on the roof, breaks a window, and drops a busted tin can down through. The Tin Can says something to effect of “I’m going to come in there and kill you all, but if one of you guys can kill one of the other people before sunrise, I’ll let you all go.”
Betty and the gang decide that these new guests are the reason the Tin Man has come to kill them and decide that they need to die instead. They try locking them up in a meat locker, but it doesn’t work. Randy and Jack overpower them while Stephanie and Leslie kind of stand there and scream.
They lock Betty and Frank in the meat locker, somewhere along the line Pete kidnaps Leslie and the rest of them run around the house ala Scooby-Doo chase.
It’s about this point that they all start having visions. All the visions have something to do with some awful thing they did or experienced in their lives. For Jack and Stephanie, they both have visions of their daughter Melissa, who drowned in a frozen lake when neither of them had time for her.
Yeah, I said that right. Apparently, that’s the message we get from their vision. Their daughter’s death because they’re bad parents, folks.
Leslie gets stuck in a room full of dolls and frilly stuff and pies. Lots of pies. Which she has a memory of that she’s supposed to eat all those pies. There’s something about a creepy uncle who, we presume, molested her.
And in Randy’s vision, he goes back to that time he shot his dad while they were hunting. But then, his dad was a jerk, so…
All right, so while all this is going on Jack meets a little girl in the house, Susan (Bale). Susan tries to lead him out, but he hears Leslie crying for help and goes to help her. She’s being attacked by Pete. They fight Pete off and Betty shows up and it’s a whole thing, but they end up escaping.
Okay, so, it’s around here that things get…well, unreasonable. There’s another Scooby-Doo chase where they all end up in this room with red curtains and wall pentacles, there’s this whole moment where Jack has an evil twin and black smoke’s coming out of his hand…
Anyway, they escape that and almost get out only to find the police officer from earlier is outside. Huzzah, they’re saved.
Nope. Sorry. Turns out the cop is the Tin Man. He and the family take them all back inside the house and convinces them that they should just kill each other and get it over with.
Susan shows up and Mr. Blonde – I mean, The Tin Man gets really angry at her and tells Randy to shoot her. Randy does. A big struggle ensues, and Randy and Leslie end up killing each other.
The ending to this hot mess of a scene is that a light just magically starts coming out of Susan’s corpse. Jack and Stephanie take the light and defeat the evil Tin Man with it because…Jesus?
I don’t know. There’s the whole undertone of good vs evil God vs Devil thing happening in this whole movie that’s really confusing when you get down it.
Okay, but that’s not the best part. The best part is when Jack and Stephanie find themselves running away from the house and walking back to the road where they left their car, they find that the car is a smoldering heap.
They try talking to the cops, but the cops just ignore them. Through their conversation, they find out that the four of them actually died in a fiery car wreck.
But then! Jack sees his dead body and runs towards it and lo and behold, he’s alive again. He revives Stephanie and they live happily ever after…
Or whatever.
I don’t know what to give this one. I mean, I guess it gets a little raspberry.
I mean, it was a good quality movie and it had its high points, but between Betty, Frank, and Pete chasing them all around the house and The Tin Man chasing them all around the house and the visions and Leslie coming onto Jack-
Oh, yeah, that happened too. For no reason. I guess to imply that she’s…a slut? And, oh, how I love subtle slut-shaming in horror movies.
Next week…House on Willow Street, which I’ve been wanting to check out for some time now. Yay!
See you next week!
--O~
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