Haunt

I'll level with you.  I'm not in the best frame of mind to write, be it fictional or something with the same tenor as, say, a movie review.  Irritability is the culprit.  Thinking back, 2019's Haunt made me irritable as I was watching it.  So this is relevant information!  I thought that we were done with torture porn.  Didn't we leave it to exsiccate in the callous streams of summer sunbeams?  Wait, I might be onto a lyric.  I'll write a sludge song called "Torture Porn Still Sucks," and the chorus will be an anthemic gang shout of "This!  Is!  Not!  Novel!"  Haunt acts like it's too clever for the room, but everyone has already left the room.  Clowns are creepy.  We get it.  Now do something interesting.

Average Girl is sad at a Halloween party.  She meets Cool Dude and the two of them ride with their friends to an isolated haunted house attraction that is so sketchy and open to question, no one in their right goddamn mind would stop there.  See, I'm already peeved with the shit-by-numbers plot.  The first half of Haunt takes an inordinate amount of time getting to where you know it's going.  I'm assuming that the idea was to peg away at character development, but despite presentable performances, I couldn't bring myself to care about these muttonheads.

The pace is trying.  I had to employ the benefits of two separate "screenings" to finish this thing, but fortuitously, I paused the action at the halfway mark.  That did make Haunt easier on my horror digestive system.  Still, the film should thank me for seeing it through and writing anything about it.  That's a tad harsh.  I mean, I did throw a couple of Z'Dars into the change cups that Scott Beck and Bryan Woods - the pair behind the picture show - held in their possession.  But why?  In my microcosm of genre critique, entertainment value is paramount.  Should every other measure of quality fail, I should still be able to observe the mania you have projected without wanting to chug peroxide.

I have come to the conclusion that the second half of Haunt is...so-so.  It's well-lit, well-staged, well-choreographed, and well, shit.  I didn't hate it.  The villain masks and costumes are spooky.  There is a little, and I do mean little, bit of suspense.  What we have here is half of a torture porn corpse tethered to half of a thriller, a Shudder exclusive that is clinging to life.  I say, end its suffering.  I'll gather the chaplain and notify the loved ones.  By the way, this review is merely an opinion.  It is a correct opinion.  If you disagree, you are wrong.  Thank you for understanding.