The Deep House (2021)

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Posted By: brian@brianschell.com December 21, 2021

  • Directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury
  • Written by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien David, Julien Maury
  • Stars Camille Rowe, James Jagger, Eric Svain
  • Run Time: 1 Hour, 25 Minutes
  • Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgqjv1endGY

NEW Giveaways!

This week we have TWO new giveaways to announce!

  1. We have NINE copies of the new horror film, “A House on the Bayou” to give away. On December 26th, 2021, we’ll contact nine lucky people.
  2. We have NINE copies of the new horror film, “The Deep House” to give away as well. On January 2nd, 2022, we’ll contact nine lucky people.

Winners for both will be chosen from the following:

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

The unnerving horror thriller A HOUSE ON THE BAYOU is now available On Digital and On Demand! A family vacation in rural Louisiana takes a sinister turn when neighbors show up for dinner uninvited, testing the family’s fragile bond and forcing dark secrets to come to light. Buy or Rent A HOUSE ON THE BAYOU and watch it today. Unrated. From Paramount Pictures. 

A claustrophobic underwater haunted house. If that sounds like your kind of thing, give it a watch, although the story has some real problems, and nothing is really explained.

Synopsis

Tina and Ben, a young couple, go to an abandoned sanatorium. They explore abandoned buildings for their streaming channel. They do a flyover with a drone. Seven children were murdered here, and supposedly the nurse still haunts the hallways.

Three months later, Tina’s holding her breath underwater in the bathtub. She made it up to 1:22 for her best breath-holding time. She tells Ben three minutes and he says “that’s it?” They’re going scuba diving. Credits roll.

They’re in a small, mostly abandoned, village in France. They get directions to the secret spot on the lake, and there’s crowds of vacationers there; it’s a crowded park now. Ben wants more views on his YouTube channel, and this place isn’t going to get them more likes & subscribes. Tina wants him to stop worrying and just enjoy their travels.

Ben talks to a guy who knows a “proper secret spot” that has a perfectly preserved house at the bottom of the lake. Pierre explains that the lake was flooded voluntarily back in the 80s. They park the van and cover the last few miles by foot, but eventually, they arrive.

They get their scuba stuff set up, and Ben has an underwater drone as well. Ben explains that they have sixty minutes of air, and then they dive. First, they find a car that’s in surprisingly good condition.

At thirty meters down, they find the walled gate to the property with “No trespassing” signs posted. They don’t find a house, they find a crypt. No, there is a house as well. All the doors and windows are sealed, but they find a way in through the attic window.

All the furniture is still inside the house. It’s murky and hard to see, but they go through from room to room. They start hearing a voice- was it on their radio or somewhere else? Most of the stuff inside is surprisingly well preserved.

The drone dies, and they have to reboot it. They find scratches on the inside of the front door, as if something was trying to get out. The drone detects movement, but Ben and Tina don’t see anything. Tina is creeped out and wants to leave, but Ben insists they search out the rest of the rooms. They find many posters of missing children.

They discover a huge cross mounted to a door. What’s on the other side? They pull down the cross and go inside. They can’t see anything. Then they find loads of film and a pair of human figures hanging from chains. They find a huge trap door with a pentagram on it. There are also jars with body parts in them.

They start to head back upstairs to leave. “It’s more than a haunted house, it’s a crime scene,” yells Tina. When they get to the attic window to leave, they find it bricked up. Tina panics, and Ben has to talk her through calming down. Tina sees a ghost behind Ben, but he doesn’t see it.

They go back downstairs to try and break one of the windows. The windows won’t break, and the shutters won’t open. Ben and the dead couple vanish, and Tina gets hooked on a chain. She panics, and when she recovers, the bodies are back, and Ben is still there.

Suddenly, the two dead bodies come alive and start to chase them. They shut them in a room and try to get out through the chimney, which collapses on them. Somehow, Ben and Tina get split up in the process.

Ben finds a family tree for the Monetgnacs, the people who lived in this house, and he sees that Pierre was their son. Ben starts acting weird, as if he’s possessed. Tina feels something crawling around inside her suit. “It’s only a snake,” says Ben. “Swallow it,” he says. She flushes her mask. “Soon, you’ll have nothing to be afraid of,” he adds.

Ben suddenly knows where there’s a secret door that he opens. The two enter a home theater room, and the projector turns on. They watch Pierre and his father. They kidnapped neighbor kids and sacrificed them. When the neighbors came for them in vengeance, only Pierre escaped

Ben and Tina fight as the dead people close in. She stabs him in the shoulder, and he wakes up from being possessed. Sarah the ghost stabs him again, and now he’s not getting away. As the three ghosts come for Tina, she finds that she’s at 0% air. She takes a deep breath and goes through a tunnel without her equipment. She comes out of the tunnel inside the crypt, and she manages to break those doors open.

She heads to the surface, but it’s been an awfully long time, so she drowns. She probably shouldn’t have lied about her breath-hold time…

Commentary

Ben has some really expensive-looking drones for a guy whose YouTube channel only gets 50,000 views on his best video. I don’t think YouTube pays that well.

There’s lots of creepy imagery here. It’s a fairly standard haunted house story, although this time it has the added gimmick of being underwater and often hard to see anything. After the first ten minutes, there’s literally no acting involved; it’s guys in suits and masks underwater. The main characters could have been replaced by stuntmen or really good CGI for all I could tell. There was lots of talking, which was certainly dubbed after the fact.

There’s some stuff about kidnapping children and sacrificing them and pentagrams and stuff, but it’s really just an underwater haunted house film. Even with that, it all feels unexplained and pointless. They were Satanic child pornographers who were killed by the locals. OK, so why are they ghosts? Why did Pierre trick the couple into going down there? Why is Pierre’s sister a ghost when she was a prisoner as well? What did Pierre hope to accomplish? What did the ghosts want? There may have been some kind of logic to all this, but it was never explained.

If you are aqua-phobic or claustrophobic, this movie could be pretty tense for you. After a while, I just got tired of watching the blurry bubbles.