Dark House (UK DVD)
Gareth Jones
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Starring Tobin Bell, Luke Kleintank, Alex McKenna, Anthony Rey Perez, Zack Ward, Lacey Anzelc, Ethan S. Smith
Directed by Victor Salva
Distributed by Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment
A few months after his mother, resident in a mental hospital since he was a child, dies in a mysterious fire, 23-year-old Nick (Kleintank) obtains the deeds to ‘Wormwood’, the dilapidated country home where he believes his absent father may have lived.
Seeking to get to the bottom of his parental heritage, Nick gathers up his best friend Ryan (Perez) and pregnant girlfriend Eve (McKenna) and hits the road in search of the house. Along the way they run into three State Land and Property workers – Sam (Smith), Chris (Ward) and Lillith (Anzelc) – who are out mapping the local area… and may just know how to get to the house.
So, our plucky bunch set off through the woods – and they do indeed find Wormwood, but there’s a nasty surprise in store. Long-haired, super-permed hobo Seth (Bell) has declared the home his residence, and with the help of a gang of similarly long-haired, axe-wielding hobos who run like gorillas and have a mean swing, Seth successfully drives the group from the land.
Things only get worse from there. All roads apparently lead back to the house, and after a few spooky encounters inside, Dark House enters into siege territory as Seth and his crew of monkey-running axe-men fill the grounds and start laying waste to the cast.
But Salva has something smart up his sleeve. Throughout the film, various characters are seen conversing with a disembodied voice through the air vents in their various premises… a voice that (while distinctly lacking any semblance of threat – unintentionally) would appear to be something to do with Nick’s father. There’s a grander, demonic game at play here… and nothing is what it seems. Salva takes his time before pulling the rug out from under the proceedings, but he does it well – it’s elegantly played, and notches up the interest factor very efficiently indeed.
The early stages of Dark House feel meandering and banal – indeed, if the very first scene were to act as any indication of the overall quality of the film, the performances included, it would be an utter failure. Thankfully – it isn’t. Once Tobin Bell hits the screen, he brings a compelling gravitas that was hitherto sorely lacking and things begin to take off, the quality ramping in almost every aspect, towards an impressively bizarre scene of all-out demonic axe warfare.
Visually, Dark House also lacks impressiveness until it gets into the woods… but once it’s there, Salva makes some nice use of his locations, and some really great costume design for Seth and his crew. The titular house is, as suggested, dark and foreboding with some impressively gothic set design, and once night falls, Salva gets to play with the lighting and fog to pleasantly atmospheric effect.
A subplot involving Nick’s ability to touch people and see visions of how they will die is left almost completely unexplored, save to offer a link to his supernatural heritage, and the ending comes much too abruptly, lacking in closure and satisfaction – not to mention the almost complete absence of Nick’s supposed ‘big bad’ of a father. It lacks a sense of scale – of real odds at play amidst its mythology – and becomes a mere wet fart.
In other words, it’s a whole lot of buildup for a tiny little pop at the end – but the twists and turns, the strong performance by Tobin Bell and the very interesting core idea of Dark House make it an easy flick to get along with. Given those, you shouldn’t feel too let down by a visit to it.
Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment’s UK DVD release of Dark House is perfectly fine in terms of audio and video. The night scenes are solid, keeping a good grip on Salva’s well-tackled lighting, and the score – while thoroughly pedestrian for the genre – booms and shrieks as much as it hopes to. In terms of special features, though, we have only the trailer.
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