HAUNT / HAUNT

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS / CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Another of those instances where two films with the exact same title but absolutely nothing in common show up on the same streaming services. The earlier Haunt is listed on Amazon Prime as a 2015 film but is actually from 2013 (according to the IMDb and the copyright notice at the end of the credits) and is probably the better of the two: a straightforward haunted house movie that does little we haven't seen a hundred times since The Amityville Horror at least, but does it likeably and effectively enough that it gets by.

A family move into a creepy old house, not knowing about the deaths of the three children that occurred there years before, but are soon visited by the expected weird and inexplicable occurrences. (The family makeup of parents, one teenage son and two younger daughters mirrors the previous family.) In one of the bedrooms the son finds an old radio machine for contacting the dead, picking up occasional but clear words through the wall of static... This Haunt is haunted house Boo! horror by numbers, it's never actually chilling and it's not going to scare you very much unless you've never seen a horror movie before. But it's solid enough with a few familiar names in it (Jacki Weaver, Ione Skye) it's decently put together and never boring.

More than can be said for the later Haunt from 2019: there's nothing supernatural about this one. It's set in one of those extreme Halloween funhouse attractions so bizarrely popular in America, in-your-face updates of fairground ghost trains, except that this one's got real blood, real homicidal maniacs and the visitors have to go through much nastier horrors to get out. It's from the original writers of A Quiet Place, but it plays more like Rob Zombie's rubbish 31, with zero motivation for its nameless group of masked psycho killers and a love of the grotesque carnival world that's nowhere near as vivid as Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse.

This Haunt is nastier, more vicious and bloody but not very likeable or entertaining. It does make one of its characters a victim of domestic violence, which might have been more interesting if they hadn't then set up her abusive scumbag boyfriend as a potential hero to redeem him somehow, although it (wisely, and happily) doesn't follow through on this. Maybe if these Halloween haunts were more popular on this side of the Atlantic, I'd have responded a little more to it. But they're not, and I didn't.

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