The Haunting of Whaley House (2012)

IT'S SPOOKY SEASON AGAIN! And I have some absolute crackers lined up for this month... I... think... I haven't actually watched any of them before now... Truth be told I'm not massively into horror movies. Don't mind some of the older, milder classics so much, but most modern / post-modern horror movies that are just about going BOO! for the sake of going BOO! or are just gratuitous, bloodthirsty violence for the sake of being bloodthirsty and violent just don't really appeal to me much. I prefer the more kitschsy, cheesey and character-centric ones. So I'm going to ease my way into the month with something just a little bit spooky and potentially a bit crap with: The Haunting of Whaley House from 2012. An Asylum movie apparently "based on true events" and from what I can tell, not released to coincide with some other, more famous Hollywood blockbuster. The film focuses on a tour guide who breaks into one of America's most famous haunted houses, fucks around, and finds out. In brief. In my experience, when Asylum movies spend more time trying to be actual, competent movies and less time just trying to puppet and parody whatever more well known source material they tend to be based upon, they can actually, genuinely turn out to be decent and surprisingly good movies! With this one being - I think - a more independent production and less constricted to the typical Asylum formula, I'm actually going into this with some optimism. Maybe, maybe, it will be pretty good?

After the movies... why... why is this movie so quiet?... after the movies opening sequence which sees a pretty dark curly haired lady go hysterical and start coughing up foam during a tour of America's Most Haunted House, tour guide and new on the job: Penny Abbot (Stephanie Greco) - who doesn't believe in ghosts - lets her friends talk her into taking them along for their own personal tour at night, with everyone being mostly sceptical about the existence of ghosts. Having not been in the house less than 5 minutes when there is a knock at the door, Penny learns that one of her friends also invited along professional ghost... hunter? and Psychic: Keith Drummond (Howard McNair) who is a fully grown adult in house with a bunch of college students... not creepy... As they start to move around the house, we cut to the next scene where, for some reason the pretty lady with the curly hair from earlier rocks up at the house in her hospital gown and after talking to a ghost in the upper floor window, starts hacking at her own neck with a hand axe... Back inside the house and after unpacking their ghost finder toys, the crew play the old glass game where they ask the ghosts questions whilst all making finger contact with a glass in the middle of the floor. There's probably a fancy name for it. All of them except Giselle (Carolina Groppa) who refuses to take part. And the ghost/s only seem to respond when Penny asks them questions. Meanwhile Keith Drummond sort of starts wandering around on his own until he re-joins the group and convinces Penny into letting them have a full tour of the house. Then we get some more token bloodshed as the caretaker for the house, who's name I didn't even catch, turns up to feed the resident cat (?) before discovering the severed head of the aforementioned pretty lady and impaling himself on the spout of the water fountain. Back inside and the gang make their way to the 2nd floor and to the Master Bedroom where they seemingly make contact with Thomas Whaley, the former owner of the house. Keith opines that Thomas Whaley is in the house to protect his loved ones who died in the house and are bound to it as ghosts in the afterlife. Whilst in the bedroom, Keith is overwhelmed by the presence of another spirit; Anna, who tells Keith she recognizes Penny before she loses her connection with him. Giselle freaks out after the door slams shut and she can't get it open and sufficiently terrified by the whole experience, storms out of the bedroom before she is shocked by the appearance of ghost in the doorway and falls backwards down the stairs, killing herself. As the rest of the crew process what just happened and start freaking out themselves, one of the lads; Craig (Graham Denman) gets into a fight with Jake (Alex Arleo) when Jake wants to call 911 but Craig won't let him, suggesting they leave Giselle behind in the house and pretend they know nothing about what happened. Suggesting that otherwise the police will just assume they killed her. But after Penny slaps him and snatches the phone from him, she tries to call the police only for the phone to stop working mid call. When Penny tries to leave, the lock to the back door becomes boiling hot and Keith opines, by way of alot of exposition, that deaths on the property have strengthened the power of the ghosts inside the house, and that they won't allow the group to leave. The ghosts cause the house to tremble and in the confusion snatch and fling all of Ray's (Jason Owsley) ghost detection equipment, causing most of it to smash. He freaks out and goes on a foul mouthed tirade calling out the spirits until he is literally suspended in the air by his throat until he dies right in front of everyone. Very quickly coming to terms with the fact that yes: ghosts are real and yes they are very scary... the rest of the crew flounders around to try and figure out how to escape, whilst Keith decides to go back to the 2nd floor bedroom and try to bargain with the ghosts to let everyone leave, with the others behind him in huddled pairings. One of the ghosts tries to grab Vanessa (Arielle Brachfeld) scaring her arm before something appearing further down the hall forces the gang to take refuge in one of the rooms. Keith tells the others that it was "Santiago" one of the resident ghosts who has turned into something not human, and that he "died bad, so he turned bad." When he manages to bash the door down, he disappears and Keith opines that he used up his energy breaking down the door before he is flung across the room by an invisible force. Meanwhile on the ground floor, the police arrive on the scene with some of Penny's message seemingly getting through to them. They make their way into the house and discover the bodies of Ray and Giselle and after calling out, are greeted on the stairs by Jake and Penny. When one of the officers hears crying from the other room he goes to investigate before promptly getting his skull crushed under the grip of one of the ghosts. The other officer flees upstairs with Jake and Penny back to safety. After barricading themselves in, Keith begins to express concerns that maybe Vanessa isn't ok... before he spots the ghost of a young girl he calls Lisa. He breaks through the barricade and goes after her following her around the house and eventually into what looks like an attic where, after the girl stops running away from him, he confides in her that he had a daughter that looked just like her and that her and her mummy were both killed in a car accident and that he misses them both very much, when he tries to reach out to touch her, the girl screams and runs away. He looks around to search for her but ends up getting his skull crushed by something with claws behind a plastic sheet... Back inside the barricade and Vanessa starts rocking backwards and forwards before she turns around and reveals she has been possessed, the ghosts tell Penny they "want you back." before they release Vanessa and she collapses to the floor. Craig freaks out and decides he will break a window to escape if he has to before the ghosts fling a chair at him and impale him on a chair leg. Vanessa seemingly goes crazy and kills the police officer with a claw hammer as he crouches over the body of Craig, pulling his gun from the holster she points it a Penny and Jake blaming Penny for everything but then backs up before explaining that the ghosts want her to stay and shooting herself in the heart mimicking the death of one of the ghosts haunting the house. The surviving pair of Penny and Jake make their way to the attic when Penny remembers there is a fire escape there. Inside, Jake spots Keith's discarded flashlight and reaches to pick it up when whatever is behind the sheet grabs Jake, stripping the flesh from his arm and when Jake recoils he accidentally decapitates himself on a cable. The creature behind the sheet, tears its way through and reveals itself to be some kind of zombie / demon thing and starts lumbering towards Penny as she wails out in terror. However before it can even get to her, the ghosts pull it away and start pleading with Penny to stay with them mistaking her for Violet Whaley, daughter of Thomas and Anna. But when Penny pleads with them to let her go explaining she isn't Violet, the ghosts just sort of melt away as Penny backs up too far and falls down the hole in the attic floor to her death. In the closing scenes one of the other tour guides arrives to discover the carnage and holding up a photo of Violet Whaley reveals that her and Penny looked very alike and as she locks up the house Penny struggles to come to terms with the fact that she is now a ghost and bound to the house like all the others.

This house looked suspiciously similar to the one used in Dinosaur Hotel... but uh yeah, this was a way better film than that garbage fire. This one was... ok. I feel like there was a real genuine effort put in here to make this the best possible version of itself and there was alot that was done well with the resources that they had. There was elements I didn't like and bits where I feel it could have been done better, but for the large part this was a positive one and not a bad little movie really. It walked the tightrope a little bit at times between is this or isn't this terrible but it was mostly decent and entertaining.

Let's look at the positives first; despite most of these haunted house movies having fairly the same premise; family moves in, ghosts terrify them for whatever reason. I thought this one had a fairly original take on it. The whole victim looks like one of the relatives thing is not the most original granted, but I kinda liked how that was kept until the end and there was the whole "what do they want?" kind of element baked into it. It kept it entertaining and interesting to a degree and felt fresher than just; 5 kids break into a house and get picked off one by one for no reason. It gave it a bit more of an edge over maybe some of the other movies in the genre. By no means completely original, but different enough that it gave the movie a narrative to play out.

Similarly the special effects, whilst fairly simple at times, were pretty decent. Some of the death scenes bordered on unrealistic and most of the blood wasn't really convincing enough to turn your stomach but comparatively the ghosts looked fairly decent if, again, kept fairly simple, and the weird demon / creature thing at the end genuinely looked amazing albeit it was on screen for about 2 minutes... weird use of all your costume budget? Must have been left over from another Asylum flick? But yeah, these low budget movies sometimes die a cheesy death in the special effects department but this one, not so much. They were alright.

The acting was a bit of a mixed bag. Stephanie Greco as Penny was punching above her weight in this one and absolutely should be doing bigger and better things in m opinion. She had a lot of range and had to portray a fairly wide spectrum of emotions and was pretty convincing at it. Similarly despite being in a bit of a more limited role I thought Arielle Brachfeld as Vanessa was pretty good and showed a lot of potential. The others were, for the most part, fairly good, but at times came through as though they were trying just a little bit too hard to act like they'd seen similar roles played in other scary movies... it only really came though a handful of times but I was feeling it. Howard McNair as Keith Drummond was a bit of an odd one and I'm not sure how much of it was down to his character or down to his limited range... a bit difficult to really comment on. I thought he was fine, but he could literally just be rehashing the same role he plays in every movie... honestly not sure.

And also cinematography-wise and production-wise everything was at least acceptable to above average. The music has a slightly suspiciously budget and open-source kind of feel to it, that I've gotten a few times with these Asylum flicks, but it was at least suitable and in keeping with the themes of the movie and fine stylistically for the scenes it was layered over. Some decent cinematography also, especially when it had to be utilised to cut corners on scenes where they couldn't apply expensive CGI. That can sometimes descend into a completely confusing and sloppy mess but here it was kept to an absolute minimum and the movie benefited from it. 

The only negatives I do have are that, as aforementioned, the amateur acting at times really started to show and in typical low budget movie fashion there was a bit of a dial back on action in exchange for paragraphs of dialogue to pad out the run time. It wasn't half as bad here as I've seen it in other movies but at times it was there. And it did damage the pacing a bit, but when the movie picked back up again it captured your interest again. Similarly there was some very low budget - very Asylum stuff at the start that could immediately kill off your interest in the movie before it's even really got started: a big boobed blonde lady prancing around in the garden which is all very typically Asylum. And I don't think this movie really needed it. It felt a bit like box ticking.

Otherwise, well... yeah... this was one of the good ones! And it does happen. When they really put the elbow grease into it Asylum can produce a good movie. I'm not saying they are necessarily going to compete at a cinematic level with million to billion dollar budget productions, but they can at least put together a competent, interesting and entertaining movie when they make an effort which is ironic given that they are more well known for completely the opposite. I would... honestly... watch this again I think! I actually thought it was alright! Not hugely into horror movies as I mentioned at the beginning but yeah this one was ok. Good job. 3 out of 5.