Death House is one of those movies that I find difficult to pin down to a specific year of release. IMDB and Wikipedia list it as 2017, sure, but most other places list it as 2018 and it certainly didn't get a general release until this year. But since I'm currently at that time of year where I'm desperately trying to catch up on as many films released this year as possible to widen the pool for my best and worst movies of the year, I'm counting it as a 2018 release.
The Death House is a prison specially built to hold the very worst of humanity's killers. A government facility where serial killers are kept captive in virtual reality cells and studied for a greater understanding of evil, or subjected to psychological experiments to reprogramme them out of their homicidal urges and mould them into productive members of society. And then there are the "Five Evils" - five individuals so evil and depraved that they are kept in the facility's lowest level, the ninth, where it is hoped they will never escape. Agents Toria Boon and Jae Novak are being given a tour of the facilities by one of the doctors running the experiments there, Dr Eileen Fletcher, when an escape plan is put into action by newly-arrived prisoner Seig, a Neo-Nazi with the ability to regenerate from any wound. Trapped in the Death House, the two agents find that their only hope is to descend deeper into the facility and reach the Five Evils, who apparently hold the key to stopping the escaped prisoners - as well as hidden truths about Boon and Novak's pasts, such as why both have tattoos on their bodies that they have no memory of getting...
Have you ever had a good friend or someone you really admire come to you and ask you to look at something they've done, and give your honest opinion on it? And you really, really want to like what they've done, but the more you look at it or watch it, the more painful it gets? That's kind of the spot I'm in right now. Death House was described as "The Expendables of horror", bringing together as many horror icons as possible in one film. At least, that was the original plan of Gunnar Hansen when he envisioned it and started to write the story, before his untimely death in 2015. After that, I suspect that having to get a new writer (eventual director Harrison Smith) is where it all started to go wrong because the finished film is a tangled mess of plot threads that go nowhere and wasted cameos. Why bother getting names like Michael Berryman and Sid Haig, for example, if they get either one single scene that goes nowhere or about two lines in the whole film? Not to mention Camille Keaton, who gets brought in for a brief scene as a rape and murder victim (with Danny Trejo as her killer). Yeesh.
There was clearly supposed to be much more done with the Five Evils, for example. An apparently immortal Nazi (not Kane Hodder's character of Seig, who was an entirely different unkillable Nazi); a woman clearly meant to be Elizabeth Bathory; a super-smart mutant with a giant claw for a hand, a necromancer and a man whose preferred methods of killing are "crucifixion and turning people inside out". Excuse me, movie? I'd like to learn more about these characters, please... Oh, we're just going to gloss over the mention of necromancy and the guy with a giant claw for a hand? Actually, there is apparently going to be a prequel made that delves into the story of the Five Evils, but right now that's too little, too late for me because the way the film used them they were equal parts MacGuffin and Deus Ex Machina.
Then there's Toria Boon and Jae Novak, two agents with dark pasts and tattoos on their bodies (that we get to see in the world's most plot convenient co-ed shower) that they don't remember getting. Now if you've been paying attention, you'll remember that they work for a government facility that specialises in wiping the minds of killers and reprogramming them to become useful members of society, and so you can see exactly where this subplot is going. If you didn't... well, you do now, but it's okay, it's not like this revelation had much bearing on the plot anyway. There's also the bit with The Russian Sleep Experiment, which isn't explicitly named as such, but anyone who knows their creepypastas will recognise it the moment they hear, "We no longer wish to be free." That comes out of nowhere as well - three of them just stumble on the room they're in and Dee Wallace's character says something about, "We don't know what happened here,"; they hang out there for a bit so we can get a good look at the practical effects, and then we move on. It feels like subplots were just being flung at a wall to see what stuck, regardless of how much sense any of it made.
Death House wants to wow us with philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil, and debates about transhumanism and morality, and shock us with its gore, and keep us interested with characters like the Five Evils and Seig, but it never really delivers on any of that except maybe the gore. How did Seig end up with his healing factor? What was the deal with that Nazi kid at one point? What was the point of the Icicle Killer? What was the deal with the Three Satans? Why don't we learn more about the damn necromancer and the guy with a giant claw for a hand in the basement? Not to mention, if I really wanted to see Barbara Crampton talk transhumanism, I'd watch From Beyond, because she's at least in fetish gear there.
