House Of The Damned (1996)

Credits / Details

67%
Overall Rating

Ranked #13,433
...out of 20,690 movies

Genres: Horror Horror Comedy Supernatural Horror Zombie Film

The plot revolves around Liz who is having her 21st birthday party and finds out that her mother, Emily is an evil witch who wants to kill her and steal her youth so that she can go without aging for another 21 years. Everyone else in the house is killed in supernatural ways except Liz, who has to not only try to survive her mothers powers and all of her friends who have come back to life as zombies, but she also has to break the curse before midnight. --IMDb

Review by Bill Wolford
Added: May 7, 2012

First of all, before I even start the review, I want to do a buyer beware. This is falsely advertised as "The Original" House of The Damned, which is simply just not true. I don't know if this was done to try to trick unwary buyers into purchasing this, or what the intention was. If you're looking for the original movie called House of the Damned, that film was released in 1963, and has nothing at all to do with this film or Sean Weathers. So there you go. Do some research before you buy either film, so that you make sure you're getting the right one.

On to the film. This movie, shot in black and white, centers around the daughter of a witch. This witch made a deal years ago with another that if she kills her offspring before their 21st birthday, she can retain her youthful looks for another 21 years. This story is told to her by her grandfather, who actually turns out to be her brother, because the mother hasn't aged in so many years. A birthday party is set up for the young girl by her witch of a mother, and in the ensuing madness, all of her friends are killed off. Just when you think all is lost for our young hero, the ghost of her father shows up in a mirror and tells her that there is a a spell written in the basement, and she must get through her now undead friends that the witch is using to get down there. Once there if she reads the spell backwards, her friends tortured souls will be released, and they will attack and kill the witch. Can she manage to get through this undead horde to find the spell to make everything right again? You'll have to watch and see.

Now, in all fairness, I think I just gave the movie a lot more sense in that synopsis than it actually has. It's really quite a convoluted mess. The camera work doesn't help out at all. The black and white in this film is either too dark and not letting us see what is really going on, or too bright, which actually hurt my eyes a couple times while trying to watch the film. I'm not sure if Sean Weathers actually makes movies anymore, (This DVD is laughably headlines as a 15th anniversary edition, as if there is something special about it) but please Sean, get some better cameras to work with. At least ones good enough not to fry my retinas while I'm trying to watch your movie. Sean also wore too many caps in this film, as he wrote, directed and produced. Maybe a better producer would have helped with the crappy camera work. There was one thing I was truly grateful to Sean for in this movie, and that was it's 61 minute running time, and that included credits as well. So while it was a movie that I mostly suffered through, at least the suffering was short lived.

The acting in the film ranges from barely passable to irritatingly awful. I was going to pull my ears off if that grandfather faked a coughing fit one more time. The non-special special effects were truly cringe-worthy, and were basically filmed shots of random items going backward, or a door to a small jewelry chest opening and closing. The effects had nothing to do with the movie, except the cool whip on our zombies mouths. Everyone that makes low-budget films, please please PLEASE take note. Make an interesting story first. Make it creepy, develop the characters, make us care about what is going on. Because at the end of the day, we just want to be entertained, no matter how much, or how little you spend on your film. The same goes the other way. A piece of trash is just that. It doesn't matter if you spent your life savings on it, or a billion dollars, it's not going to matter if you make a film that people aren't going to be entertained by. Avoid this film. 1/10.

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