Dark House(2014) *

A bafflingly stupid, fright-free horror movie from the makers of Jeepers Creepers.

The preposterous Dark House centres on Nick Di Santo,(Luke Kleintank) a young man who has the uncanny ability to see -through premonition- how someone will die just by touching them. Early on, Di Santo goes to a bar were he finds that his dark ability to ‘see’ death, however disturbing, is a total turn-on for Alex McKenna’s character, Eve, who finds his shrieking and convulsing on a barroom table just totally irresistible. Less interestingly, we learn that Di Santo’s mother is a complete basket case who has been locked away in an asylum for most of her son’s life. As the narrative leaps forward many years, Nick discovers that a house he has been drawing since he was a child is in fact real and may turn out to be the key to unlocking his mysterious past - all the while - a strange fraternity of weirdos communicate through air vents and seek to hinder our protagonist from learning about his deranged antecedence.

Whereas Jeepers Creepers had a certain likable goofiness, nothing in Dark House makes any sense. To say that it is a shambling mess of incoherent horror ideas is to misrepresent just how insipidly boring and befuddling this dreary crockpot of drivel really is. The idea of a character ‘seeing death’ is ripped from the Final Destination franchise and subsequently fudged here – Salva’s movie is at once utterly stupid and aware of its own stupidity, which would mitigate its terribleness if any of the film was in any way scary, funny or indeed entertaining. The real low moments are when a jaded looking Tobin Bell turns up to do a bedraggled Jigsaw pastiche, Kleintank touches a tree and sees dead people and a synchronised troupe of axe-wielding mutants tear through a wooded area - which is meant to be scary – but they just look like the most appalling dance crew dropouts in an undead version of Britain’s Got Talent. Total rubbish.