Customer Reviews

House of Bones

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This time, Syfy have comissioned Nu Image, production company behind Shark Attack 3 and Skeleton Man, to produce a haunted house movie.

It kinda works. But really it's accidental genius; besides their notably "so-bad-its-good" films; Nu Image movies generally consist of the basic building blocks of an archetypical film.

Now, between ineffective big-budget films like the 1999 The Haunting and Darkness, and ineffective low-budget films like Crazy Eights and Return to the House on Haunted Hill, most modern haunted house films are... well, ineffective.

There are some good ones although the "average" for such a film tends to be pretty weak.

The result? That the basic building blocks of a haunted house movie, set up correctly, are ultimately more effective than the majority of the "competition".

Essentially, House of Bones is a decent haunted house film. It has... well, the bare essentials for a haunted house film, but still proves a decent time killer.

Incredibly, despite often interfering with the scripts of movies they commission, Syfy have been restrained here; there's very little CGI. Additionally the body count is low; very few expendable characters introduced in hopes of "keeping things interesting"

And that's great, because haunted house related films really need establishing time. The film didn't leave me feeling unsettled, but it had me buying the concept that the house was haunted & the characters couldn't just leave.

I found it to be an enjoyable movie. Not groundbreaking or mindblowing but it thrilled me. I enjoy Corin Nemec a lot and wish he was featured more than he was. However, Quentin is a fun character and well acted. Charisma is equally as fun to watch. The spoof of 'reality tv shows that want to suck in more viewers by playing on the supernatural' is great! I jumped out of my seat a few times. I wish this had come out around Halloween but I'm sure it will make it onto SyFy's menu soon enough. Enjoy!

This was in Very good condition! And great movie!! Arrived promptly and faster than expected! Made my Sisters Christmas Day!!

Paranormal "reality" shows get their come-uppance in HOUSE OF BONES. The story concerns SINISTER SITES, a tv show using green screens, CGI effects and a hammy host, that is losing viewers and is on the verge of cancellation. The solution: go on-site to a "real" haunted house and take a psychic along to validate the presence of real spooks. You know what;s going to happen because the movie's prologue shows us the house likes little boys.
I found this movie more entertaining than many of today's video accountings of slamming doors and weird sounds. At least something HAPPENS in this movie..believable or not.
HOUSE OF BONES main problem is its inconsistent pacing and its almost two-hour length. After its promising first-third, it sags in the middle but manages to gain momentum by its final third.
ANGEL's Charisma Carpenter's performance is one-note, almost like she really IS in a trance, PARKER LEWIS' Corin Nemec should have had more to do--he actually captured the egotistic "STAR" quite well.
HOUSE OF BONES ultimately is an okay movie, but a tighter script and the venerable "less is more" approach, it could've been better.

Plodding. Cheap. Boring.

"Scary" is definitely hard to find these days. But this was just plain lifeless. And not in a good way.

The special effects were laughable. For example, cockroaches all over the shower -- a couple crawl onto a guy's hand. He shakes his hand, the cockroaches don't move. Ghost mist -- looked like a bad 1950s matte job, complete w/ pixelated edges. (And since when do suction cups work on wallpaper?)

I love these kinds of movies. And SyFy, on average, produces good entertainment.

But I could not get through this one. Luckily, I only rented this House.

OK, so the movie is not over the top great. But I like horror movies that give you a history about what is happening in the movie. This one was produced for TV so no gore here. I am a ScFi channel fan and I enjoyed this feature when it aired. Horror/ScFi fans will love this.

Since I like Corin Nemec and Charisma Carpenter and because I only got to watch the first half of this when it appeared on the Sci-Fi Channel, I bought it on the small hope that it would work out to a halfway decent ghost flick. Yeah well, it didn't turn out all that well. Not a keeper.
Part of my displeasure has to do with a few inconsistencies with the ghost/house and how it procures its....food? It goes to all the trouble of luring a boy into the house yet takes a policemen to ground immediately inside the gate, yet needs a well to act as a mouth to get new bodies that only exist within the framework of the house.... It also went to an awful lot of trouble to hide the fact that people were going into the house and not coming out, but at the same time putting out a scrapbook of newspaper clippings detailing all those who have disappeared in conjunction with the house. Why hide the obvious so late in the game?
Very little of this movie made sense. It's as if they took the first draft of the script, said good enough, and just started filming, figuring no one would notice if some of the pieces didn't exactly fit. As for that ending!
Seen better, keep hoping and looking for better....

House of Bones (Jeffery Scott Lando, 2010)

I checked this out both hoping and fearing it was an adaptation of Dale Bailey's brilliant novel of the same name; hoping because not nearly enough people are aware of Dale Bailey (and because his work is so filmable; Joe Dante turned one of his short stories into the Masters of Horror entry Homecoming), and fearing because this is a Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie. I do keep watching them because I'm still waiting for Sci-Fi to pop out the next Cube, even after all these years. For a while, I had the small hope that House of Bones, which is not based on Bailey's novel, was going to be that film. What makes it all more depressing was that a solid script made from Bailey's novel, coupled with this cast and Lando's sometimes-inspired direction, would probably have made this Sci-Fi Channel's next Cube. For most of its length, House of Bones is the most intelligent, effective SFCOM for at least a decade. Then, God help us, we get to the last ten minutes.

The setup is brilliant, and I'm surprised no horror director has popped something like this out previously: take the fictional-reality-TV-show premise (Slayers, The Running Man, etc.) and apply it to the slew of "we're supernatural investigators who spend the night in supposedly haunted buildings!" shows that have risen to prominence in the last few years. The fictional ghost-hunting show in question is called Sinister Sites, and it has a slew of characters on staff, including alcoholic, abrasive host Quentin (Parker Lewis Can't Lose's Corin Nemec, whose career really has gone to hell since The Stand), lead investigators Greg (The Dunwich Horror's Marcus Lyle Brown) and Simon (Colin Galyean, also a Dunwich Horror alum), production manager Tom (The Steam Experiment's Rock Robinson, Jr.) and the new kids, production assistant Bub (Kyle Russell Clements from Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) and psychic Heather (Charisma Carpenter, who needs no introduction to anyone who would ever watch the Sci-Fi Channel). The site in question is a very, very scary haunted house in New Orleans, originally owned by the kind of plantation overlord who had to buy a whole new set of slaves every year when he got the carpet replaced. (Pity no one ever asked what happened to the old ones.) Simon mentions at one point that some nine dozen people had been killed in the house over the three hundred years before it was abandoned in 1951 (after a local kid went missing after chasing a very special baseball). And that's only counting the slaves the historians know about. Of course, no one who's a part of the show believes in ghosts in any way, shape, or form, with the exception of the psychic (who was hired because she's hot, but who really is psychic--none of them believe that either, naturally, and so ignore her sporadic warning that the crew needs to get. The hell. Out. Now.), and so when things start going hideously wrong, no one notices until it's far too late. Oh, and did I mention the lovely girl form the insurance company, Sarah (The Final Destination's Stephanie Honore)? Probably not, because from the second we see her, we know she ought to be wearing a red shirt. There is an unwritten rule in horror film that any supporting actress hotter than the lead must die, early, and in some sort of disfiguring way.

The fact that Sarah dies, and the fact that I can say this without any horror fan getting on my case for spoilers (after all, it's been a horror movie trope since at least Profondo Rosso a quarter-century ago, and probably much longer than that), is indicative of the film's greatest flaw--that screenwriters Anthony Ferrante (Boo) and Jay Frasco (Dirt Boy) do nothing at all to challenge the bounds of convention here (as Bailey does in his novel, set in the same kind of alternate-universe Cabrini Green that gave us Candyman, yet is treated so very differently). In fact, various pieces of the film are directly lifted from very recent horror movies entire (which in many cases lifted them in turn from other, earlier flicks). Given the title of the film I doubt it's a spoiler to mention the breath of A Haunting in Connecticut hanging large over this picture, and that horrible, horrible ending (which I will abbreviate RFED here; if you don't know what that means, and don't mind having the movie completely spoiled for you, check Urban Dictionary) is lifted straight from the recent, and much better, British film Lie Still. But if we take that out of the equation, my, what Jeffery Scott Lando (Decoys 2: Alien Seduction) hath (or might hath, anyway) wrought. If you take a quick look through the movies that Lando has previously directed, it becomes obvious that this is the highest-powered cast he's ever worked with. And here's a surprise: you put a decent cast in Lando's hands and he can get decent performances out of them. I despise Joss Whedon in all his guises, and so am unfamiliar with Charisma Carpenter's work previous to this, but she does a pretty good job here for an entirely two-dimensional character. Nemec, despite top billing, gets all of five minutes of screen time (I get the feeling he took the role to fulfill some sort of contractual obligation--or because he lost some sort of bet during the filming of his nadir, Mansquito), so no real basis for judgment there, either. But Brown and Galyean throw off the shame of having worked on The Dunwich Horror and shine here. You give me these two actors and a really good script and someone, somewhere, will take notice. Since they're the real main characters here, that actually means something.

Despite having a (okay, I'll stop dancing around it) mercilessly stupid script, Lando did what he could to make this work, and for about three-quarters of the movie's length, he comes within a hair's breadth of succeeding. The house really is creepy, despite (or perhaps because of) looking like some sort of odd cross of Early Plantation and Fifties Kitsch, and Lando looks like a genius with some of his framing shots; Greg's attic encounter, for example, is a marvel of cheese when you dissect it (I can't believe anyone let this scene show up in the movie as written, but then I can't imagine anyone greenlighted The Gravedancers, either), but Lando takes a scene that was written unintentionally-hilarious and wrings every last ounce of tension from it. I've been passing this guy off as another Tibor Takacs-like SCFOM hack for years, but this one shows he's actually got some chops. It's too bad he didn't have the script to go with them, but I know I'll be perking up more when his name appears on the screen from now on. And hey, Hollywood? Can someone get to work adapting Dale Bailey's novel, pleasekthanks? * ½

I expected this to be a poor production before I even began watching. In my experience 2 hour cable or DTV movies that SyFy has a hand in - well suck. There is an occasional surprise - even a very unusual gem.

Acting was stiff, artificial, contrived and apparently used to fill out the 2 hours. The dialog was poorly constructed and delivery was worse.

Why oh why, do an ever increasing number of movies (also on the rise tv shows) shoot 50-80% in the dark - even when views out the semi-frosted windows show daylight? My take - lower production costs and much easier to conceal bargain priced fx and background/site costs.

This had me reading the newspaper, editing photos and doing research on unrelated topics on the internet - all before the 1st commercial break.