Whatever was in that hotel… it’s out now…’
The Hell House LLC franchise has been dear to my heart since the excellent first film dropped in November of 2016. Stephen Cognetti’s weird and wonderful world of clown mannequins that move in the dark, cult fanatics that come back from the dead, and annoying amateur documentarians who die screaming in the dark has sustained across the source material, two sequels and one prequel. The latter, Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor, felt like the natural end point to the franchise, and yet, here we are with this misguided attempt to get the circus up and running again for one last go around…
Vanessa Shepherd (Elizabeth Vermilyea), one of the only survivors from the third entry, returns here and is plagued by horrifying visions of what she experienced at the now demolished Abbadon Hotel. Elsewhere, Alicia Cavalini (Searra Sawka), a character I couldn’t tell you a thing about despite only watching the film yesterday, and Father David (Mike Sutton), a priest, want to exorcise Carmichael Manor of its many demons.
Where to start with this one. Cognetti’s first mistake is to move away from the found footage style of the first four films into traditional narrative storytelling. This means that the acting, always a little shaky in this franchise, is terminally exposed in this entry. I know these films are low budget, but this is a franchise with a lot of fans out there, and Lineage often feels like a bad film school project. There are a few effective scares along the way, but the ridiculously convoluted plot provides more questions than answers, and the decision to focus on a character from the lesser sequels released over five years ago is a curious one. Cognetti here can’t decide if he wants to wrap up the loose ends and explain the lore behind Carmichael Manor and the Abbadon Hotel or create new mysteries. In the end, he succeeds in doing neither.
If this is to be the last entry in the Hell House LLC franchise (and Cognetti says it will at least be his last contribution), then we are going out with the meekest of whimpers. I had to watch this across three sittings because I kept on falling asleep (this is an incredibly and surprisingly dull film), and the final scene inspired nary a shrug – a dispiriting end to one of the most effective found footage franchises of the last twenty years.
