By Geno McGahee
I love the 1980’s SOV horror films. It was a great time for movies in general. I remember going into the old mom and pop video stores in the eighties and sifting through the low budget horror movies that were on the shelves. HOUSEBOAT HORROR brought me back to that time. It had that great SOV look to it, but, unfortunately, there wasn’t much to it.
A rock group is going to Lake Infinity to shoot a video, but the lake has a dark past. A film group was killed years before their arrival and the townies sense that the tragedy might happen again. As the group has a good time, a mystery man walks around and kills people with an axe or machete. He raided the toolshed of Jason Voorhees. At first, I thought this was going to be a whodunit because they did not show the face of the killer, but they apparently wanted to save the amazing special effect reveal until the end.
The truth comes out that a young boy was burned severely by the film group that had come before and that he may be haunting the woods of Lake Infinity. The movie slowly trudges along with filler and terrible dialogue, but I stuck with it because I love SOV horror from the 80s and I was hoping that the ending would make things better. Sometimes, a bad movie can have a great ending and then I forget about the 90 minutes that it took to get to that point. Not here though. No. They were consistent.
Some of the kills are pretty good, but that’s all this film has going for it. There is no character development and the story is just a poor copy of FRIDAY THE 13th. The filler is painful. At one time, they show the full four minute music video for one of the worst songs in horror movie history. BUT, the ending! The ending had to be worth it…
The killer at the end. The big reveal that they were saving until the end was terrible. He looked sort of like Kane from the WWE with some mashed potatoes rubbed on his face to make him look burned. I guess it was a good idea to keep his face hidden until the end because he wasn’t intimidating at all. He just looked like a bald weirdo. What a disappointment.
HOUSEBOAT HORROR fails across the board. It followed the FRIDAY THE 13th formula in the poorest possible way. There was no focus on developing the story or characters and that’s really where this movie failed. I struggled to get through this. As I said, the look brought me back, but other than that, there wasn’t much salvageable about this one.
Rating: 3/10
THE NEWEST HORROR COLLECTION IS UNLEASHED – ORDER NOW!
<
