This poor man's copy of House on Haunted Hill (the remake, which also happened to feature Jeffrey Combs) and 13 Ghosts (the remake with a thoroughly miscast Tony Shalhoub) features a flamboyant and huckster-ish impresario (Combs, in a role closely patterned on the impresario in HOHH) renovating an old house that was the scene of a mass murder into a haunted house attraction. The fact that the house was not torn down after the murders, and that it is on a residential street in a town rather than situated off some interstate highway exit is highly questionable, of course. The impresario has installed state-of-the-art holograms of scary faces and ghostly images, and hires a group of college students to serve as guides and hosts. Not a bad start, but the flat performances of the students is a dead giveaway that this will be just another clueless-teens-trapped-in-a-murder-house quickie. They will live to regret their decision to enter this particular house. In the end, it turns out the killer isn't who we may have thought it was, but the wrap-up is overly confusing for no particular reason. And the special effects can't hold a candle to the effects in HOHH or 13 GHOSTS. Combs tries his best in what amounts to a just plain bad movie.
Review of Dark House
