Horror Review: The Last House On Cemetery Lane

I already tweeted a short review of this movie, but just like Choose or Die, I just needed to write a longer, more detailed one. So, another night, another shitty horror movie on Netflix. This time, it was The Last House on Cemetery Lane, written and directed by Andrew Jones.

Look, I'm starting to feel bad for bashing Netflix, but their horror selection is very hit or miss. I've enjoyed some of them, even if they weren't always perfect. For instance, The Influence, a Spanish movie based on a book by Ramsey Campbell, who also wrote The Nameless, was pretty good. So were The Call and Under the Shadow. The Whole Truth had a couple of needless storylines, but made up for it with a twisty and satisfying ending.

John Davies, a horror screenwriter rents a house in Wales so he can work in peace. After he gets there, he's told by the landlady that there's an old woman, Agnes, living in the attic. Though he's not happy, he decides to stay. Soon, he meets Cassie, and they hit it off. Meanwhile, he starts having nightmares and weird stuff begins to happen around the house. So, we have an old manor, a blind woman living in the attic who never leaves her room, supernatural shenanigans involving a record player turning itself on, a doll appearing out of place, doors locking themselves, vivid nightmares, an old crime, and Biblical references to Fallen Angels. Sounds good, right? Somehow, Jones manages to fuck it all up.

Weird camera angles can be used to create an atmosphere of dread that leaves viewers' hearts racing as they prepare for the inevitable reveal that someone, or something, has been watching and following the protagonist, getting closer and closer until... BLOOD CURDLING SCREAM! Here, the weird angles make zero sense. Does the camera really need to spin and give us a view of John running upstairs from below? Also, some of the camera work is just confusing and not in a good way.

The pacing is off and the characters' reactions actually work against the horror. In the end, Cassie's make sense, but John is a normal person who's in a creepy house, with an unseen roommate who shouldn't be able to do the weird shit that's happening. And yet, he never freaks out the way you'd expect someone in his situation would. Yes, I know that people in horror movies can't use common sense, but in this case, John's lack of reaction actually stops the horror from building. Seriously, if a creepy doll (dolls are always creepy!) appears in a different location than it was last seen, you don't just put it back and blame the blind old woman in the attic! And if a record player starts playing in the middle of the night, you should at least stay awake to see who the hell is turning it on instead of simply believing the same blind old woman managed to come down the stairs, turned it on, and went back to her room without you noticing it, FFS! The scene where he gets locked in the bathroom is also pretty stupid: the door locking could've been an accident, but there was also the blood in the sink and the word "murder" on the mirror. Normally, people don't randomly start hallucinating unless there's something physically wrong with them or they're high. Shouldn't John be a little more worried about that? And why does he spend so much time with no trousers?

The relationship between John and Cassie never feels as deep as it should. And how old is she supposed to be? Is she the age she should've been if she hadn't died? Because we're told she was in her early twenties, and no offense to the actress, but she doesn't look like she's in her early twenties.

There's no mounting tension because the movie is unable to focus on John/Cassie and the horror writer staying at a haunted house scenario at the same time. Any self-respecting horror movie with the same premise would've sent its leading man to the library to do some research on the house, or have him bump into some gossipy old ladies and be told some bits of Agnes's troubled family history. Instead, John states that the landlady would never tell him the truth because it'd be bad for business, but ends up calling her and asking her, only to give up on trying to find answers until close to the end after she predictably laughs at the idea of the house being haunted.

The vivid nightmares are stupid and not scary. Oho, someone wrote murder on the wall! And why did he dream about people taking his teeth? That had nothing to do with what happened at the house. Also, would a person who writes horror movies for a living really freak out this easy? Especially when the weirder stuff happening in the real world doesn't generate much reaction.

The soundtrack is just bad. It super emphasizes some not scary situations too soon and makes the fact that John's behaviour doesn't match what's going on even more obvious. That song over the scene of him walking on the beach stuck out like a sore thumb. It's kinda shocking that Jones didn't write it himself, because that would've been the only explanation for why it was included.

The most shocking thing in the movie is the fact that Agnes is alive and relatively well. The sudden mention of the Fallen Angels promises some last minute Biblical horror that never materializes. Instead, Cassie just walks into the Light after John finds her corpse. And the ending is just confusing. Did the landlady come back to life and is renting the house to someone else? Are they stuck in a time loop? Is this a lame attempt at an intriguing ending to wash away the shittiness that came before? Whatever it was, it was stupid.

I get that Andrew Jones is an indie filmmaker who can't afford CGI to create some apocalyptic hell, but most horror movies don't need that to be scary. In fact, it can work against them, as seen in Jan de Bont's The Haunting. The Grudge was really good at creating a sense of dread just with the actors' reactions and unsettling camera angles. You got the feeling that there was something lurking about, just outside your field of vision. Even before that scene of Sadako crawling out of the TV, Ring had already managed to terrify its audience with very little. Just the image of the wheelchair in a secret room from The Changeling is scarier than the entirety of The Last House on Cemetery Lane. Jones had the resources and the basic plot to make a good horror movie, but he was unable to use any of it and we ended up with this crap. The only good thing about this movie is that it's short.

The Last House on Cemetery Lane sucked so much that I immediately removed all the other Andrew Jones horror movies I had added to My List on Netflix. And there's a LOT of them. Jones is an insanely prolific indie filmmaker which means that somewhere in his filmography there must be at least one good movie, right? Right? Anyway, I'm not going to waste my time trying to find it.

By Danforth