Saw Nightmare on Friday the 13th...

Now that it's November, Hollywood has started to turn their eyes on the next big money making holiday: Christmas. Even though the first Christmas movie will be out before thanksgiving, that doesn't mean Hollywood's done with Halloween yet. This week, the horror movie House was released to finish off the Halloween season.

Jack and Stephanie Singleton (Reynaldo Rosales and Heidi Dippold respectively) are a married couple that have been having problems in their marriage recently. Realizing that they need help the plan to attend marriage counseling, but on the way, to their first meeting, they get a flat after running over some loose medal in the road. Looking for a phone they wander down the road to find the nearest building, which happens to be The Wayside Inn. Once they get there, they run into Leslie (Julie Ann Emery) and Randy (J.P. Davis), who have also experienced car trouble. While the house seems empty at first, the group eventually find the owners of the hotel who offer them supper and a place to stay. Because no tow truck can come until the morning the members of the group have no choice to stay.

Everything quickly spirals out of control when a crazed killer calling himself Tin Man (Michael Madsen) appears outside and tries to kill the guests. However, he offers to will spare the rest if one of them kills another. The guests turned victims, spend the night running thorough the house, as everything starts to get more disorienting, until it seems that the house itself is trying to kill them.

It takes a fan of the horror genre to be able to make a good horror movie, and the makers of House were clearly fans of the genre. Unfortunately, it seems that they may have been a little to fond of the genre, unable to contribute to it, but instead just coping what had come before. All of the classic horror clichés are present in the movie. The masked Psycho killer, the creepy backwater family, the house that comes to life, the girl that disappears when you look twice, the possessed water, and the devil worshipers all make appearances throughout the movie. Viewers will be about to point out which scene comes from Friday the 13th and which line is inspired by Saw. Rather than tell a new story of it's own, House is like a friend who wants to tell you about a move he saw a year ago and cant quite remember all of it.

The actors in the movie try as hard as they can to make their emotions believable, but the story never develops enough to let you actually care about the characters or worry for them. And not being caught up in the story makes it more likely for the audience to wonder things like why do the characters decide that the basement with only one entrance is the best place to run to. In fact the most enjoyable character in the movie is the Tin Man who hardly ever makes an appearance. He in fact is probably the smartest character in the entire movie, being a mass murderer who finally has upgraded from a machete to a gun when trying to kill.