Director: Daniel Farrands
Writer: Daniel Farrands
Stars: John Robinson, Chelsea Ricketts, Paul Ben-Victor
Run Time: 1 Hour, 37 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/33PfltF
Synopsis
We begin with a 911 call about a bunch of people in a house who have been shot dead. Credits roll… “based on true events.”
We pop back three weeks in time, and it’s 1974. Ronald, Butch’s father, is a jerk, but his grandfather gives him a brand new car. It’s one of the Butch and his twin sister’s birthday, and a bunch of kids are there for the party. They follow the daughter into the “red room” in the basement. She tells them a story about how the area used to be known as a portal, where the living could commune with the dead. They start chanting and watch a penny slide across a plate. The light bulb explodes. We see that Big Ronnie doesn’t like his son and abuses him at every opportunity.
Not long after the party, strange things start to occur in the house. On searching her 23-year-old son’s room, his mother finds needles, drugs, and a notebook full of creepy images. Butch starts hearing voices in his room coming from the wall.
When the family goes out for Halloween, leaving Butch behind, someone ransacks the house. Big Ronnie immediately blames Butch. Sister Dawn mentions that she and Butch used to talk to “them” when they were little, but Butch thinks he’s been heading “them” again. This, naturally, gives rise to another satanic ritual, which only makes things worse.
Weird things start happening at 3:15 am each night. Meanwhile, Big Ronnie has mafia troubles, and it could be that they are sending people to terrorize them. Unsurprisingly, things escalate, and it appears Butch is going insane. Or is it all real?
Things continue until Butch kills everyone in their sleep. Then we close on footage of Butch’s arrest and conviction of murder.
Commentary
It’s well acted and seems to focus heavily on the abuse and terror of living in this situation, especially when you’re on drugs in the 1970s, but it’s really slow moving.
So, yeah, Butch really did kill his entire family, and how he did it still remains a bit of a mystery, but other than this single fact, the rest of the film is completely fictionalized and made up. A lot of this is simply made-up melodrama, and none of it is at all scary.