From A House On Willow Street review: A fresh take on a story we’ve seen countless times before.
From A House On Willow Street review, Kat Hughes, Frightfest 2016
From A House On Willow Street review
Bad types Hazel (Sharni Vinson), Mark (Zino Ventura), Ade (Steven John Ward) and James have planned the perfect crime. Their plan involves kidnapping a young woman Katherine (Carlyn Burchell), the daughter of a very wealthy couple, and holding her to ransom. Unfortunately for them, Katherine isn’t as innocent as she seems and soon has the tables turned on her captors.
From A House On Willow Street, directed by Alistair Orr, is a claustrophobic home invasion film with an inventive edge. Merging the heist and demonic genres, the story is different and highly entertaining. Soon after capturing their human prize, Hazel and her gang of thugs start to be haunted by people from their pasts. The problem is that they’re all dead, meaning they can’t, or shouldn’t, be real. Then members of the team start dying…
For a film made on a tight budget, the visual effects of From A House On Willow Street are pretty decent. The prosthetic make-up is creative, the demonic force part cenobite, part something else. Then there’s the strange spiked snake-like tongue that tries to devour the team. It’s a macabre and grotesque addition that induces more than a few squirms. If you thought that face-hugger ‘tongue’ was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The story flies along at breakneck speed, the run time itself coming in at only eighty-five minutes.From A House On Willow Street jumps straight in, not wasting a single moment of screen time. Personally, I felt it could do with being ever so slightly longer, purely so we can get to know our cast better. It would also have helped build a little more tension. The run time means that we don’t fully have time to develop a sense of dread before we’re plunged into demon carnage.
From a House on Willow Street review
It was only two years ago that You’re Next launched Vinson as a potential scream queen, her role as Hazel now further cementing this. At the start Hazel may be the bad guy, but it doesn’t take long for her final girl qualities to shine through. As with her character in You’re Next, Hazel is a proper bad-ass and screams Sarah Connor in several scenes.
A twisted tale of demonic possession, From A House On Willow Street is fresh take on a story we’ve seen countless times before.
From A House On Willow Street review, Kat Hughes August 2016.
From a House on Willow Street forms part of this year’s Frightfest programme.
