October is the month for haunted attractions, and this DVD release from Fangoria Frightfest comes just in time for the Halloween season. Dark House (shades of Richard Laymon's Beast House novels) involves a state-of-the-art attraction set up inside a Gothic manse that was once the site of gruesome murder: fourteen years earlier, the psychotic Janet Cooper Darrode stabbed to death all the young wards living in her foster home, and then dispatched herself by sticking her blood-stained hands into the garbage disposal. The film's protagonist, Claire, witnessed that massacre as a child and has been traumatized ever since (in one of the best lines of the film, a detective opines that Claire has developed "more bugs than Windows Vista"). Now a drama-major college student in the same town, Claire is going to try to finally exorcise her personal demons by agreeing to work as a tour guide at Dark House. Turns out, of course, that this haunted attraction is actually haunted: Miss Darrode is the ghost in the machine who transforms the computer-generated holographs into truly deadly stalkers of Dark House's employees.
Such synopsis makes the film sound like straightforward scare fare, but Dark House does offer a couple of interesting plot twists at the very end. Also, throughout its runtime, the film deftly shifts between technological, psychological, and supernatural explanations for the horrors transpiring inside the former foster home.
Dark House is no cinematic masterpiece: the acting is amateurish, and the characters portrayed are oftentimes annoying (veteran horror actor Jeffrey Combs gives the over-the-top performance of the year as the entrepreneur who sets up the haunted house). On the other hand, the holographic bogeys (the axe-wielding clown was my favorite) are wonderfully envisioned. And the demonic, disheveled Miss Darrode (looking like a cross between Zelda from Pet Sematary and Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons) is genuinely creepy as the film's arch-villainess. Overall, Dark House proves as frightfully fun as a real-life haunted attraction, and is well worth exploring this October.
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