House of Purgatory

Are all American teenagers so old looking? I can't think of anything good to write about this drivel.

My quick rating - 5,1/10. We have all heard the rumors of the haunted house that is 5 floors, and if you can make it through all 5 you get your money back. I am sure there are variations of this urban myth and this film revolves around 4 kids that go looking to conquer it. But instead of a typical haunted house they stumble into a house that uses your own secrets from inside to terrify you. A good premise of a movie and to some extent it is well done. Purposely unbelievable and summed up by the great line "i don't think this is a normal haunted house" LOL. The film is more of a psychological type of terror with each overcoming the fears they hide inside. Atypical acting and good use of minimal locations to make the atmosphere seem plausible. I admittedly did enjoy this for what it was, nothing flashy and could have gone a long way with a bit more put into it.

This film starts off as promising. There is some good dialogue and the characters are generally interesting and believable. Then somehow several of the characters are just dropped as our four mains (not necessarily the most interesting of the characters introduced either) decide to ditch their party and go find a haunted house.

Once this happens things slowly start to go downhill, not only does the ditching of these other characters make their scenes at the beginning completely pointless (why not just start at the haunted house?), but it means that things that looked like they were going to come into play later actually don't. So we get stuck with the four leads as they go through this house, and even that can't hold together long.

There is just no pacing in this movie, it builds you up and then lets you down. I did quite like their approach on what is really scary in life, but most of the time it doesn't seem like the characters should really be going through what they are, which again could make sense, but the ending undoes that too. So overall this film feels like it is chasing its own tail, almost as if it had two completely different writers that had completely opposing ideas about what film they wanted to make. There is some good here, but it is buried underneath a pile of confusion and mistaken misdirection.

By IMDB it says this movie was made with 200 000$, wich is really low budget for a movie. This is probably why they couldn't do much in term of special effects or visuals, and i think it hurt the movie. Its better than going for bad effect tough, ill give them that.

Where the movie could had shine is in the story, it start nicely, but then it drag for a while and you have a feeling of nothing happening and eventually the ending seem rushed. Very weird pace. The idea behind the movie is nice, but its execution, partly due to the writing, partly due to the budget im guessing, make it turn out to be just ...kinda boring.

But to be fair i seen worst in term of low budget horror and i watched this on Tubi. so it didn't cost me a dime. Therefore i can't complain too much. If you want an Halloween movie, this really is not it as the Halloween theme is quickly dropped after the intro. If you are a horror movie junky you may get something out of it, but i can't say i would recommand this movie.

Just another low budget horror movie among gazillions...

Im with most of the other reviewers- it was an interesting concept and slight twist on the "haunted house" premise. But it seemed to become increasingly non-sensical. Punishing someone for being molested and another for being gay-? Those arent choices, like punishable choices in which one would be punished in a cosmic sense. Also, my understanding of purgatory was it was sort of a "nowhere", whereas this seems more like hell or tartarus. Meh.