House of Bones (2010)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I don’t like how some horror movies somehow end up with faint praise for being bad-but-not-terrible, considering how low the bar can be once you get into low-budget efforts. House of Bones is one of those bad-but-not-terrible things you can catch later at night on cable or on the fifth page of streaming choices. It has a mildly entertaining premise by 2010 standards, as members of a supernatural reality-TV show are attacked by a haunted house. The story is nothing special, but the film gets a few extra jolts of interest from starring forgotten-but-not-unknown Charisma Carpenter and featuring rather more gory effects than you’d expect from a film made for SyFy. What it doesn’t have is the kind of atmosphere than haunted house movie depends on — it’s a series of cheap scares, clearly led by the logic of a bad-but-not-terrible horror movie script rather than any kind of recognizable attempt at creating something more. Anyone stuck watching this rather than anything better may want to focus on the frights and the gore rather than try to make sense of the story, which is lazy enough to keep gaping plot holes without even trying to patch them up. This is filmmaking-for-a-buck at its dullest, and yet not completely terrible. There are times where you want to watch a film but not really watch it all that closely, and that’s probably the best-case scenario for House of Bones.