Critical Film: A Review of Walled In

Walled In

Starring:

* Mischa Barton
* Cameron Bright
* Deborah Kara Unger
* Noam Jenkins
* Pascal Greggory

Director:

* Gilles Paquet-Brenner

The house on haunted hill has people in the waaaaaalls! That was the first thing I thought after the movie started on the uncommon note of drowning a little girl in a tomb of cement. They showed the building designed by renown architect Joseph Malestrazza, the scene of a string of 16 murders of tenants who lived there. I swore that I was looking at the set of House on Haunted Hill the entire time because every view from inside looked like it was borrowed. I almost expected to see the ghost of Chris Kattan open a way out so our lead protagonist, Sam, could escape. The movie revolves around Sam, an engineer sent by her father to lay out the plans to demolish the building…why he didn’t send a team, or assistants..who knows.. She arrives and is greeted by the obsessive Jimmy, whom she finds out just ONE day after arriving, has a massive crush on her and believes she will do anything he says. This apparently doesn’t phase her, nor does the fact that a man almost kills her with an axe, the place was the tomb of 16+ people, nor that Jimmy’s father was one of the victims of the killer.

The films has numerous flaws, but it is shot rather well. The camera angles led you to believe that secrets hid around every corner, along with the lighting, everything was made really creepy. The major problems lay in horror movie judgment and the way the film pulled a 180 from what it was leading up to into something completely different. Sam should have made a call, gotten people out there to help her when things were going crazy. She should have not gone into the room where the bodies were found in the middle of the night with only a single flashlight held by the kid who obviously has a huge and obsessive crush on you. The movie also goes from being a most excellent ghost film into The Babysitter territory with the kid’s obsession leading him to imprison her with Joseph Malestrazza, whom was kept alive and it turned out HE was the murderer! Nooooot a big shocker, seeing as how most of the bodies were found in his walls of his own room in his own building..

Turning from ghosts to love story gone wrong makes no sense given what the viewer is shown before hand, but besides being a little disorienting, the movie isn’t all that bad. The acting is pretty damn good, the camerawork and atmosphere are done very well, but the attempt to fuse two completely separate types of movies into one is where the movie failed. Not bad, but not the best either, that’s why it gets a 3.7 out of 5.