So, a friend had recommended Haunt for me since I had signed up for Shudder. I had never really heard of it, honestly. It's actually written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods who worked with John Krasinski on "A Quiet Place". And produced by good old Eli Roth. The last thing I heard from Eli Roth was the terrible, terrible attempt at a "Cannibal Holocaust" remake. It was called Green Inferno. I'm pretty sure he even cast his gorgeous wife as the lead which is so, so sad because the movie was absolutely atrocious. Maybe that's why they divorced?? (just kidding?)
I know sometimes a horror movie can be funny, and sometimes it's like referencing an old quote or like just trying to crack a laugh from the audience for a break. But the movie was so bad, it wasn't even funny. I was disappointed because I was quite a fan of the Hostel series. I love a super gory slasher film anyway so I was excited for this.
Starting mini-spoiler alerts now. I'll try to keep them minimal but I need to critic/applaud a little bit. The movie reminds me quite a bit of the Saw series. Particularly the 2nd installation.
Starts out with 6 pals going to haunted house. Regular old sketchy situation, in the middle of nowhere, no one else is there, and it's in some abandoned looking warehouse thing. The group, just having left a club on Halloween, goes to get in and they have to sign all these waivers (which i mean in the end, what for? we all know where this is going).
The female lead, Harper, is upset and bummed out cause she's fighting with her asshole boyfriend. It's important to note even for the review, that he follows them to the haunted house in his red truck.
Harper gets a photo sent to her phone that is this man in a dark red robe and a mask that notes, "Guess my costume" in creepy red lettering. So as soon as this man appears in the haunted house obviously we think it's Harper's boyfriend the whole time. Which I think is clever.
I'm going to write this section as if you've basically seen the movie, which honestly even if you haven't... you have. It's your typical haunted house set up with traps and murderers. We know this going into it. It's a slasher movie. We know some bad shit is about to go down.
To keep this a little short I'm just rush through the bones I need to pick. Spoilers:
1. When in the house and travelling through the rooms and tunnels, etc, they lose one of their friends, Mallory. They think about it for about a minute, but decide to keep going without her. Like, why? Why would you keep going and abandon your friend? Alone? In the middle of no where. So Mallory's future is already basically determined. Cool death scene though. They keep searching cause obviously all the doors around them keep shutting. So next some other creepy guy shows up and actually speaks to them. So here's problem duex. 2. Random actor guy in all white and spooky mask says, "Does someone need help?" and walks towards the group. Mallory is toast, they're all crying. Bailey is bleeding, everyone's scared. So they are like, "Well yeah duh we need help." He walks towards them but DOES NOT REMOVE HIS MASK. LIKE WHY. Why are you trusting some random that can't take off a mask. These people just deserve what they get. They watch their friend get murdered and then decide to accept help from someone who will not tell them his name or take off his stupid ass costume. He gives them keys which basically makes them all run off in different directions. He says, "Here's the way out" and goes back up the tunnel and then boards them up. Like obviously. Another one of them dies at the fate of the red cloak man. Evan, the asshole who threw a drink at Harper at the beginning of the movie and never apologized, finally escapes. But obviously has no where to go. Runs into clown man from the beginning and well.. you know. - Pause from criticism for a second - An interesting scene where Harper gets caught with the red cloak man. He is standing above her and she calls him "Sam" - which is her boyfriends name. And at least after that he takes his stupid mask off to reveal he is not in fact Sam. He is some dorky face tattooed horn implanted nerd who could resemble the singer of The Prodigy with tattooed eyeballs. Anyway cool, he's a bad guy and not Harper's boyfriend. Decent twist, I thought. I was convinced. More running. More attacks. There's at least 6 or 7 bad guys working in the haunted house trying to murder them. We are left with just Harper and Nathan at this point. But luckily through a series of interesting events they escape. There were some really cool like Saw style set ups, which I liked, and I hope horror movies use that style of trap forever. This may have turned out to be a shit review but, I mean it's a decent slasher thriller. What do we expect from a Slasher anyway. Slasher movies have been around so long it's hard to write things that are unexpected or not predictable. For there being a bunch of nobodies in the movie, the acting was actually not so bad. I got spooked few times, I didn't get bored. It was decent.
Good gore. Good murder scenes. Good suspense. Decent Halloween flick.
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