I heard a lot of hype for The House on Pine Street for awhile when it was making it's rounds across the film festival circuit. Sitting down and watching the movie was unattainable unless I wanted to travel quite some distance to catch it at a festival. I was elated to see that it was finally available to view privately. And then I started to watch it....One of the first things I noticed immediately was the terrible acting. Every motion in this movie feels like just that, going through a motion. The three main characters you'll be dealing with (Jennifer, Luke, and Meredith) all lack fluidity on the screen overall. Worse yet, they fail to bring forth any stir of emotion in the more intimate scenes. A big supporter in the downfall stated above, is the atrocious script. The dialogue is dry and immensely boring (add onto this the white-washed filter they used to shoot the entire film, and it's basically a lullaby.) There is little to no character development even as you reach the end of the almost two-hour run time. And worse yet, the big reveal of the "evil" that haunts our protagonist at the end can be equated, basically, as "bad vibes dude". I REALLY love and respect a good horror film. It's a genre in film that calls for a lot of finesse. It takes phenomenal acting, a good plot, and creating an atmosphere to encompass all these elements together in a package containing ample amounts of dread. The House on Pine Street nailed absolutely none of these elements. It was an extreme disappointment. If you want to see a good horror film from 2015, check out "It Follows".

If it's gonna be dumb at least make it fun. That's surely the unwritten rule of horror. But this bland and generic haunted house indie makes the fatal error of trying to keep a straight face throughout, however predictable the events and however skin-crawling the dialogue. It's restrained in its deployment of violence – but also, sadly, in terms of enjoyment.Jennifer (Emily Goss) and Luke (Taylor Bottles) move into a big crumbling house in a sleepy Kansas suburb. She's seven months pregnant and reluctant. He urges her to give the place a go. They're soon visited by Jennifer's overbearing mother, Meredith (Cathy Barnett), whose presence seems to trigger memories in Jennifer of a previous breakdown. So when the house starts taunting 'n' haunting, the assumption is that Jennifer is simply on the turn again. Most of the horror (and accompanying tedium) emerges from the fear of not being believed, and the threat to mother and child.It's a familiar setup: giving a chance to an instantly creepy house; one partner who's nervous and one who's patient; the forbidden room; the secret past; the strange staring neighbours. I was surprised when no one finds a box of old video tapes and newspaper cuttings. The 'Better Movie Checklist' looms large: The Omen (creepy child); Poltergeist (tossed furniture and a visiting psychic); The Shining (ambiguous twins); The Haunting (a chilling case of mistaken identity).But more than anything there's the presence of Rosemary's Baby: motherhood anxiety seeps into the very fabric of the film; particularly its best scenes, between Jennifer and her scheming, possessive mother. There's a moment when Jennifer goes to her mum's house for solace, and they seem to slip back into roles that have existed since Jennifer's childhood. There's enough eerie tension here to suggest the story may be turning towards an intriguing third act. But that junction is promptly passed by.The overarching problem is, the cinematic influences are great but where's the USP? The drama is rote, the plot is plodding, and the scares are imaginative only on a micro level: mouse traps triggered by an unknown force, or boxes inexplicably moving of their own accord. Like many a horror movie without an identity, it starts well enough, with some intriguing, subtle spookings. But alas, it becomes quickly clear, through formulaic plot beats and zombified dialogue ("There's no such thing as ghosts"), that this is a movie lacking a unique personality.Speaking of which, Goss and Bottles put in a pair of performances which are adequate at best. Having far more fun are Barnett as the mother and Jim Korinke as the possibly-psychic Walter. The latter gets the best piece of bad dialogue: a WTF climactic speech about the forces of energy (or something) which is presumably meant to tie everything up, but which is so rambling and bizarre that you have to wonder if the actor himself knew what he was on about.The photography has a pallid appearance, all autumn hues and naturalistic lighting, which only serves to highlight the unconvincing characters and jars with the laughable events. When Jennifer is being tossed around by the poltergeist, a different score would have made it comedy gold. But instead we get by-the-numbers ambient doom music connoting something much more horrifying than what we're actually seeing.Remarkably, at the end I was left unsure as to whether a key character was meant to have died. The reactions of the other characters just seemed incongruent. I'm not sure if this was unforgivably poor writing and editing or whether I'd simply stopped caring by then. Either way it does nothing to endorse this very uninteresting and uninspired film.

I was one of this film's Kickstarter backers, so I had the privilege of watching it on DVD before it is available to the general public. I don't want to go into the plot because I detest spoilers. This was a first-time feature film, with a relatively small budget, but you wouldn't know it by the quality of the finished product. The acting is spot-on, the direction good, the sound quality is flawless (which, if you watch a lot of lower budget films, you know sound is often a disaster). Excellent cinematography, terrific casting, and the editing is first-rate.Watching a film like this at home on DVD is not the same as in a crowded theater. I didn't find "The House on Pine Street" to be a SCARY film. I did enjoy it, and found it to have a few scares within. Mostly it is higher on the creepy factor, with a sense of unease woven throughout. They avoid the most obvious clichés, and the well-rounded characters give the film a depth that is sadly missing from many of its kind.I recommend The House on Pine Street as a thinking person's horror movie. You won't jump out of your seat (well, maybe once or twice), and you won't see blood spurting everywhere. Plenty of other films to take care of those needs. THOPS doesn't try to be anything it's not; it ignores the standard definitions of genre and does its own thing, successfully.

This was recommended to me because I liked The Conjuring, but I think The House on Pine Street hearkens back to an even earlier more stylish film -- Robert Wise's The Haunting. Like that film, The House on Pine Street uses mostly sound effects and lighting for its scares, though mixed in with modern shooting techniques to make it feel fresh. The film creates honest scares while also portraying a young wife's ambivalence toward motherhood and returning to her hometown. Fun and more effective for what it doesn't actually show or tell us is going on, it waits awhile before getting into the paranormal. It's patient, intelligent, and well-acted.