Note: The current IMBD plot description "Five people are spending the night in a haunted house. Things get dicey when some of them start turning up decapitated" is only half-right--the second sentence is very inaccurate and misleading.
This is a game low-budget regional attempt to do a traditional "haunted house challenge" story a la "The Haunting," et al. But it's undone not so much by the low budget as unimaginative direction and lack of atmosphere. (Admittedly, the soft, probably TV-copied prints this movie can be seen in probably don't help.) You know the handling will be somewhat clunky right off with some poor matching of shots including day-for-night ones. Otherwise the film makes a semi-intelligent decision to keep things relatively dark (hiding production shortcomings) and avoid overt violence, but there just isn't much sense of style or idiosyncrasy to the direction to convey any real sense of threat. Too many of the "scares" are in the form of crude sound effects obviously dubbed in later, and which the adequate (for this kind of movie) actors seldom react to at all. There's so little attempt to ratchet up suspense that when "The End" comes, it's one of those times you think "Wait--that was IT?" Not because things didn't happen, but because their presentation is so flat there's no sense of having reached a story's climax. Anyway, you've certainly seen worse, and this is notable for not being particularly lurid or cheesy in an era when most low-budget horror was exactly that. But it just doesn't really come to life. Compare it to another low-budget film from just a few years later like "Let's Scare Jessica to Death," and you can see how an ability to convey an unsettled atmosphere makes all the difference.
This is a game low-budget regional attempt to do a traditional "haunted house challenge" story a la "The Haunting," et al. But it's undone not so much by the low budget as unimaginative direction and lack of atmosphere. (Admittedly, the soft, probably TV-copied prints this movie can be seen in probably don't help.) You know the handling will be somewhat clunky right off with some poor matching of shots including day-for-night ones. Otherwise the film makes a semi-intelligent decision to keep things relatively dark (hiding production shortcomings) and avoid overt violence, but there just isn't much sense of style or idiosyncrasy to the direction to convey any real sense of threat. Too many of the "scares" are in the form of crude sound effects obviously dubbed in later, and which the adequate (for this kind of movie) actors seldom react to at all. There's so little attempt to ratchet up suspense that when "The End" comes, it's one of those times you think "Wait--that was IT?" Not because things didn't happen, but because their presentation is so flat there's no sense of having reached a story's climax. Anyway, you've certainly seen worse, and this is notable for not being particularly lurid or cheesy in an era when most low-budget horror was exactly that. But it just doesn't really come to life. Compare it to another low-budget film from just a few years later like "Let's Scare Jessica to Death," and you can see how an ability to convey an unsettled atmosphere makes all the difference.