The Halfway House

totally wrong on every level but captivating all the same. so inexcusably pathetic but also so addictive to watch just to see if the acting picked up further into it. a good Sunday movie if you are hungover from the night before, great for zombie-ing out to on an overcast afternoon.

i found myself wondering if these actors have made it in Hollywood, or whether they still are waitressing. not quite even a soft porn movie even if there are plenty of breasts on show.

please ensure you have downed a bottle of vodka or two in the hour before commencing.

OH LORD this one sucks. Pseudo-Lovecraftian garbage with very little gore, a few tits (but NO full-frontal), horrible acting - oh Christ, I give up - the list of negatives about this film is just way too long and encompasses just about every aspect of this piece of trash.

The super-condensed version (because that's all this crap deserves): Girls are disappearing around an all-girl halfway house and being fed to a monster that lives in the basement by the head nun. The police and one of the missing girls' sisters gets involved in the "investigation"...

In case you haven't already gathered- I pretty much hated this "film". Posing as a modern exploit film but not having the balls to take the concept all the way - THE HALFWAY HOUSE is a let-down all the way through. I don't know if this film was supposed to be loosely based on one of H.P. Lovecraft's works - but there are references to the Necronomicon, Miskatonic University, the town of Arkham, etc...that would probably cause ol' H.P. to rise from his grave and slaughter everyone involved in this waste-of-film if he would ever have had the misfortune to witness it. Anyway...unless you REALLY dig schlocky, no-budget, SOV/STV, camp-horror with virtually no gore and not nearly enough nudity - leave this one on the shelf...2/10

Arguablly one of the most perverted non-porno films to emerge in recent cinema. It is the kind of thing that makes you want to ask out loud 'what were they thinking?' Highly offensive, sexist, gross, and without a molecule of talent. At least the movie does not take itself seriously, making it watchable if taken as camp, but I estimate that only one out of every ten (or even twenty) people will find this entertaining.

After her sister disappears one afternoon, Larissa Morgan turns to the cops for help. She suspects something to do with, Sister Cecilia's halfway house for troubled girls, and comes up with a twisted plan to get some answers. She seduces a cop into sending her to the halfway house, pretending she is unstable. Her intention, to go under cover and investigate the place. Everything goes bananas; we get silly sex scenes, extreme profanity, sadistic morons, and a hungry alien in the cellar.

The Halfway House is junk, but it is not the worst movie out there. It has the potential to entertain but its audience isn't liable to be anything other than sex-crazed, ruffian teen boys. Everyone else will see The Halfway House as what it is, a lobotomized piece of sexploitation

No pun intended - this knows what it is. I would argue the badness (what else could I call it?) is intended - don't give me that look! Maybe I am wrong, but it is better to imagine they did all this on purpose! Like the bad people in this - they service and they sacrifice for the evil.

There is a lot of nudity, there is a monster (hand made too at times) ... and it gets its tentacles everywhere. Makes kind of sense - well not the movie, that does not make much sense, but hey ... this is here to entertain the lowest of expectations! There is nothing wrong with liking this or being entertained by it - this is not Citizen Kane, this is not a classic ... this is not even halfway there ... even if I always go the full distance (when it comes to puns)!

So many horror films these days are such a disappointment, but man was I surprised by this little low budget gem! It had me in tears, I was laughing so hard. It had it all... lots of nudity (I do mean lots!), some incredibly funny lines, and some great kills!

It was directed by Kenneth J. Hall, who wrote "Puppet Master", a Full Moon film that was actually quite good. They should have had Hall write more of their films.

Anyway, I managed to catch a screening of "The Halfway House" at the North Hollywood Film Fest. The rest of the audience loved it as much as I did. It seems like a tribute to all the fun exploitation horror movies I loved in my youth, filled with sexy juvenile delinquents (played by much older girls), weird characters, and a Lovecraftian monster. Hall isn't satisfied with spoofing one genre. He takes on a whole bunch of them… and succeeds! The production looks good and the cast, led by veteran actress Mary Woronov, is first-rate. Anyone who is a fan of old-school drive-in horror movies from the 60s and 70s is bound to like this movie. I can't wait to see what this guy does next.