"Evil has an address..."
Sometimes, a horror film introduces an antagonist that is memorable, threatening, and sometimes even iconic. Other times, the main antagonist isn't in the script. Rather it is the script itself.
From A House On Willow Street has all the components of a good, scary movie. The premise is certainly intriguing; four criminals kidnap a young woman in order to demand a ransom from her parents. What the kidnappers don't realize, however, is that the girl has strings attached. Bloody, demonic strings. Needless to say, by the time they realize that they are in over their heads, it's too late to turn back.
The characters in the story each have enough of a backstory to make them distinguishable. The movie begins with a fire, and cuts to a woman with burn scars. This introduces our main protagonist, Hazel, played by Sharni Vinson. Katherine (Carlyn Burchell), the hostage, is suitably creepy. We quickly find out that there is more to her than meets the eye, and her story develops over the course of the entire film. Carlyn effortlessly shifts from distressed to menacing as the script calls for. The other main characters, Ade (Steven Ward), Mark (Zino Ventura) and James (Gustav Gerderner), are serviceable enough.
The score and sound effects are nice. The soundtrack offers underlying tension when called for, and accompanies jump-scares effectively. At one point, a sudden silence emphasizes how creepy the ambience had been up until that point. The visual effects are decent. There is some obvious cgi, with varying results. There are both ghost zombies and real, possessed zombies that have memorable designs.
There are some paint-by-numbers scares to be had here. Nothing that really stands out, but they work. The gore effects also don't disappoint when they pop up.
What absolutely kills this movie is its script; particularly the dialogue. Right from the beginning I found myself thinking, "movie is trying so hard to be a Joss Whedon movie with witty banter. But it is SOOOOO NOT a Joss Whedon movie with witty banter."
Witty banter works in other films when there is sense of camp or light-hearted winking at the audience. Here, there is none of that. Everything is so over-the-top serious that it becomes unintentionally silly. "There is something very wrong with that house on willow street" is a line that is spouted with absolute, one hundred percent seriousness.
There is so much forced camaraderie, which wouldn't be so much of a problem except for the fact that there is simultaneously so much forced internal conflict within the group. Everyone's trying to be a badass, but no one takes each other seriously. They are trying to generate tension but there are no stakes because no one has more power than the other, so everyone just comes off as being extra bitchy.
About two-thirds of the way through the film, it abruptly suffers from a severe case of over-explaining itself. This works against the films narrative because the more rules you set for your baddie, the more you limit him. So it becomes more difficult to ignore when you contradict those rules. For example, we're asked to care that one person is threatening to unchain a demonized Katherine. However, if she can already manifest zombies that infect and possess living people, all while chained up... how does this threat hold any weight at all? Katherine is all-powerful; unless the script suddenly decides she's not. Then she just lies still and takes a beating from a wrench. You know, after we've already seen her literally stop bullets.
Did I mention that I didn't like the script?
It's a shame that the finished product ended up as unimpressive as it did, because the general concept has a lot of potential. As it is, however, I honestly feel it would have been better off as a novel rather than a movie.
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