Stranger Things meets Scooby Doo in this instantaneously forgettable fantasy-horror flick from Austrian director Daniel Prochaska, exhibiting none of the former television show’s bite and little of the latter’s cheesy charm.
From its almost laughably generic title – marketed as both The Strange House and The Scary House, as if this minor tweak could make any sizable difference – director Prochaska alongside screenwriters Marcel Kawental and Timo Lombeck offer little more than a YA-infused montage of borrowed tropes and tired clichés from any number of classic horror films and mystery narratives.
Cue a grieving family moving into a sinister house with a supposedly dark history in a remote town populated by an assortment of oddballs. Eldest son Hendrik watches over his younger brother Eddi whom, after reluctantly moving into their new home alongside their mother Sabine, appears to be channelling the ghost of a former occupant, the house having been the setting for a suspected murder-suicide in the 1980s. Investigating his new digs and his brother’s strange behaviour alongside a couple of new local friends, Hendrik uncovers a tale of community gossip and family trauma.
Arguably, it isn’t a film that targets veteran horror fans, but instead teenagers wanting an inoffensive, 90-mins and done sleepover ‘scare’. But surely that doesn’t preclude The Strange House from being a bit more creative in its presentation or coherent in its writing, with the third act reveal introducing the responsible party out of nowhere with absolutely zero audience foreknowledge or characterisation. Similarly, its use of a tractor-ex-machina, which sees the local bully with whom we have spent all of two minutes preventing the criminal’s escape by inexplicably blocking his path with a tractor despite there being no justifiable reason for his presence on the scene – only makes for eye-rolling derision rather than punch-the-sky triumph.
Streaming on Netflix, The Strange House is described as ‘chilling, scary and suspenseful’. It’s none of these things.
Notes from the Multiplex 