Hell House LLC: Lineage Review

Stephen Cognetti has crafted a nice niche for himself in the Hell House LLC franchise, a series of found-footage films set in the fictional town of Abaddon, New York. The first film was an instant great in the genre, with good kills and a great use of the found-footage subgenre. Hell House LLC: Lineage deviates from the typical formula, and not only is it the worst of the franchise, but it might also be one of the worst horror films ever made.

There’s a special kind of disappointment reserved for a series you enjoy when one of its installments completely and utterly fails. I enjoy the Hell House films because they offer a special type of simple entertainment. It’s guilty-pleasure horror, in the same vein as the later Paranormal Activity films. For some bizarre reason, Cognetti decided to change everything for this installment, and every change is for the worse.

The Hell House LLC clown in Hell House LLC: Lineage.

The first, and most damning, change of all is the switch from found footage to a standard narrative. The first few minutes seem like an interesting break from the regular visuals, but once the film gets started and it’s clear that we’re actually stuck with a non-found-footage approach, the only thing I could do was groan.

Let’s be clear: this series only works because it uses found footage. Even as a franchise fan, I can confirm that I would not watch any of these films if they were told normally. Found footage is a fun enough premise in itself, in the same way that you can sell someone on a film just by saying it’s a musical. It’s obvious that Cognetti doesn’t possess the skills to tell a compelling narrative without the use of shaky handheld camerawork.

Lineage is such a genuinely bizarre experience because — get this — it is a direct sequel to Lake of Fire. Yes, for some reason, Cognetti decided to continue the story from the worst film in the series, one that almost nobody has seen, and you MUST watch it if you want to understand a lick of what’s going on.

For reasons only God knows, this film is wrapped up in more lore than an Avengers movie. Almost every line of dialogue references a previous location or a monster/demon/clown brought up in one of the previous films. It’s not enough just to have seen the films; you have to know all the details of the lore to even grasp a semblance of the plot.

I had the displeasure of watching Lineage alongside my brother, who had never seen one of the movies in this series. He kept turning to me every ten minutes and asking, “What the hell is happening? Who is that?” I could only shrug and shake my head with a simple, “I have no clue.”

I won’t even bother with the details of the plot because it’s so convoluted and obnoxious. We follow one of the random girls from the third film on her quest to get some answers about what’s going on in the town she lives in. Creepy stuff happens. I’ll spare you the rest.

I also won’t mention the names of the actors or any crew involved in this outside of the director. It would be unfair to tarnish their names by attaching them to this review. I also have nothing kind to say about them, because every performance is uniquely terrible, every shot uniquely ugly, and every other element of the film uniquely confused.

Hell House LLC: Lineage is an R-rated horror film that refuses to give us even a single on-screen kill. Horror is such a big genre right now, so why would anybody think that on their fifth go-around of a series they should go SMALLER with the plot? Like every other baffling decision in the film, I have no answer except “stupidity.”

The fictional town of Abaddon, New York, is the most unlived-in place ever put to film. There are maybe a dozen actors in the film, and Cognetti decided to skip out on getting more than a few background actors to appear in a single scene. In found-footage films, this works because you can confine your actors to a single location. Here, we’re supposed to believe this is a town with real people, but it only seems to exist in the context of our main characters, with a total population of maybe ten people.

Is Hell House LLC: Origins worth watching?

No! The overused trope of characters going crazy and having dream sequences is put to endless use here. There’s nothing lazier than a horror filmmaker taking all the scares and throwing them into the characters’ heads. Every time the film even gets remotely scary, guess what? It didn’t happen!

To put it as plainly as possible for Stephen Cognetti: nobody really cares about the lore of this series. You cannot create a film that breaks away from the fundamental draw of the series to buy us into the thinly plotted world of your franchise. You’d be pissed if a Saw film was a coming-of-age drama about one of Jigsaw’s random victims. Don’t be arrogant; you clearly aren’t better than found footage, because Hell House LLC: Lineage is one of the worst horror films in years.

Hell House LLC: Lineage is in theaters on August 22.