Home Entertainment DEATH HOUSE to be THE EXPENDABLES of the horror genre

DEATH HOUSE to be THE EXPENDABLES of the horror genre

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Bruce Campbell had previously mentioned the idea of an Expendables of Horror movies, starting ot make an attempt to get many of the horrors genres best actors of its hey-day together for a new series of horror movies that will hopefully reignite the genre the way Expendables reignited the “we shoot everything, but they always miss me” action genre.

And indeed, it sounds like a great idea and that idea looks like it is finally going to arrive in the form of Death House except that it won’t be Bruce Campbell bringing it together, but rather a B. Harrison Smith who will be directing this horror ensemble… Yes, I haven’t heard of him either, apparently he has directed some minor B-grade horror movies called Camp Dread and Zombie Killers: Elephant Graveyard, so it is an unusual move to bring an unknown director to what could potentially be a big horror movie franchise.

Based off a script from Gunnar Hansen (best known for playing Leather Face in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre), the film is set to star a wide number of horror legends including Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Kane Hodder (Friday the 13th), Doug Bradley(Hellraiser), Bill Moseley (House of a 1000 Corpses), Michael Berryman(The Hills Have Eyes), Dee Wallace (The Howling), Danny Trejo (Machete),Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator), Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead), Don Shanks (Silent Night Deadly Night), and Camille Keaton (I Spit on Your Grave). That is quite an ensemble and although most of those actors haven’t done much outside of those famous films, it would be quite iconic to see them again in the genre.

Admittedly, I have many concerns about this project. Whereas in the action genre which The Expendables is based, you fall in love with the heroes and the actors who play them. In the horror genre, the actors are less known and it’s the characters they play that stands out. So, whether it will make any sense to have these actors featuring in roles that we don’t know them by remains to be seeing. Its certainly an ambitious undertaking however.

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The full synopsis of the movie is below:

The Death House is the Area 51 of Evil… a subterranean government facility that holds humanity’s worst on nine levels. Hell, Dante’s ninth level, holds the Five Evils… the “dark stars” of Death House. These individuals are so heinous they can never walk among society again. They may also be supernatural.

Agents Toria Boon and Jae Novak have their own dark pasts, arriving at Death House to tour its levels and observe its denizens first-hand as well as the medical and mental experiments of Drs. Eileen Fletcher and Karen Redmane. Their depraved experiments date back to the Nazi doctors of WWII.

Prison cells are virtual reality holo decks that recreate prisoner environments before they were incarcerated. A special hallucinogenic gas keeps inmates under control. The victims are homeless, bused into Death House to play literal victims while killing habits are studied. The results are sick, but only a hint of what goes on here.

Hell literally breaks loose inside the facility when an EMP device detonates, killing all power and communication and… releasing every prisoner. Boon, Novak, and Fletcher are caught in a race against advancing prisoner hordes led by occultist Neo-Nazi Sieg. The monsters are freed, and they’re going down.

Boon and Novak’s fight through Death House turns into a house of horrors gauntlet; their only hope of escape is descending into Hell and enlisting the help of the Five Evils. Events culminate in a violent face-to-face standoff with absolute evil… only to find that they have traveled down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass. Black is white and white is black and the definitions of good and evil no longer apply.

Who are the monsters? Who will escape?

It certainly sounds a little cheesy, cliched and typical of the genre it is trying to replicate, so it could work if they get it right. Now, being a horror movie, we can’t expect all of these famous actors to survive, so I’m keen to see which ones get turned into the bad guys and which ones get killed off first.

Last Updated: February 16, 2016

3 Comments

  1. Alien Emperor Trevor

    February 16, 2016 at 13:50

    Holo decks? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

    Reply

  2. James Francis

    February 17, 2016 at 18:52

    Camp Dread was awful.

    Reply

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