House of Bedlam (2008) Poster

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2/10
Incredibly independent.. (boom) but that's not always good.
rushknight10 January 2015
Let's say you want to make (boom) a movie. So you get your friends and family together, write a script, (boom boom) find a location, grab a hand-held video camera (boom) and maybe someone to work with some sound (boom) equipment, (boom) and BOOM (boom)! You start making your movie. If you (boom) are very creative and resourceful, (boom boom)) your movie might be reasonably good.

(boom) This movie appears to have been (boom) made with the above formula, unfortunately it did not (boom) turn out very well in my opinion. It has a very (boom boom) amateur feel about it from start to finish, where (boom) nothing flows smoothly or works convincingly. (boom) The acting is either wooden or overdone, (boom) the special effects are downright (boom) silly, and there are the usual violations (boom boom) of common sense. Those occur when (boom) writers attempt to force their characters to follow (boom) the storyline, rather than have the character (boom boom) reactions grow organically from the (boom) original idea. It feels forced throughout. (boom boom).

In addition, the music is the usual (boom )variety that has come to be associated with cinema of (boom ) this type: garage band grind. Call me crazy, but I've never felt that this type of music was ever appropriate for these kinds of movies. It always (boom boom) feels like just when the action starts, and you lean into the TV to see it, there is a blast of hard rock from your (boom) garage. It doesn't really pull you in, it distracts you like crazy. And yet, (boom) every movie of this genre always uses it. It's become (boom) incredibly cliché.

Finish up with a subdued bass drum beat that insistently runs throughout nearly the entire film regardless of it's effectiveness or appropriateness with the scenes, and you get a movie that is better at making you sleep than it is at thrilling you. If you have read this far, you will have noticed that the booms are really distracting and out of place. Rather than building tension, they hypnotically lull you.

Even after all these faults, the film has some small charms. It is mostly comedic, though it's a dry sort of comedy. My favorite part of the entire movie is when out of nowhere, two characters have a politically charged argument about prostitution. Earlier on, there is also an appearance by a character that makes.. no sense at all and simply doesn't belong. But they go with it anyway.

You can also tell that the cast is enjoying itself, and that does count for a lot. Still, there are too many rough edges on this one. Hopefully their later works (there are some) are more polished.
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1/10
In a word, dreadful
Leofwine_draca7 March 2017
Warning: Spoilers
HOUSE OF BEDLAM is a truly terrible shot-on-video horror effort in the BLAIR WITCH style. It involves a group of friends going to visit an old closed-up brothel with a sinister past. The place is haunted due to a historical crime in which the prostitutes were murdered and the place closed up.

The director of this one wouldn't know a horror movie if it came and bit him on the backside. The whole production is a complete waste of time, the nadir of which is the flashback child murder sequence which plays out with a soft rock score - completely ridiculous. It's not possible to take any of this seriously, which partly down to the actors who repeatedly laugh instead of scream.
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1/10
In another word HORRID
dgallaher-112653 November 2018
I could only make it through the first 20-25 minutes before I finally said enough. I'm all for indie movies but this one is truly horrible.
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This isn't Poltergeist
nogodnomasters13 August 2017
Warning: Spoilers
A group of college kids head to the woods to camp out and gather samples for class. While in the woods they encounter the haunted "House of Bedlam" where 200 years ago prostitutes were put to death in am anachronistic scene.

There is a lot of hate out there for this film. I found it had a number of scenes "so bad it is good." Katie Russell provided the token eye candy as the camera always seemed to fall on her cleavage or butt cheeks. On the Erie scale Katie is about a 10 (look at the rest of the women in the film). The people of Pennsylvania do act like that, so the acting wasn't as bad as the critics made out, although it still had a number of bad scenes. At the end of the film there out outtakes, so contrary to popular belief they did retakes. The film highlighted local bars and bands. I like it when independent films use real bands with original music for a soundtrack rather than use that idiotic single piano key. However, in this case the music didn't always fit and the one scene in the woods there was restaurant noise in the background. License plates should be blurred out, unless fake. In one scene they didn't leave the campground because they only had two hours of daylight, which didn't make any sense when they tell us later they were only 100 yards from the car. The dialogue ranged from fair to bad with the political debate in the car being the worse scene in the film. Special effects were not used.

Guide: F-word. Rape? Brief oral sex, brief nudity.
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