The Haunting of Whaley House (2012) Review

Article by SisterRoboto of lefthandhorror.com

Written and Directed by: Jose Prendes

A tour guide at a notorious haunted house gets more than she bargained for during an unauthorized ghost-hunting session with friends. Stephanie Greco, Lynn Lowry, and Leigh Davis star. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Not sure how to describe this one… it’s like someone who likes horror movies decided to write a screenplay after getting instructions from “Horror Movie Directing for Dummies”.  I think this person then got all their friends to volunteer with acting and everything else! Flat story with awful dialogues, twists were ridiculous, casting was terrible, and the death scenes were so funny that watching them all die was the only entertaining part about it. It is a b-movie afterall, not sure what I was expecting.

The movie begins with three guys outside the house, talking about how haunted it is and that they should go in and explore. Two of the three don’t want to go in and after a weird, slightly racist comment, one dude throws a rock in the window and a ghostly apparition appears in the upstairs window.  The guy backs up in to the street where he proceeds to get hit by a bus! Okay, the opening scene was a big red flag from the giddy up!

The story follows a girl named Penny, who works as a tour guide at Whaley House, the most haunted house in America! On a morning tour showing around the house, one of the guests starts seeing things and ends up have a bad reaction to the house in the form of seizures and foaming at the mouth. She collapses and is rushed away to the hospital.  Later that evening, Penny and four of her friends decide it’s a good idea to get the private, after hours tour of the house. But as previously warned by another tour guide, the spirits don’t react too well to the group being on their turf at night and soon enough things go from bad to worse.

The ghosts in the house start picking off the people one by one in the some of the fakest death scenes I’ve ever witnessed.  It’s just such poor effort on the director’s part and the stage makeup used for the ghosts is comical. Although this film is supposedly an original, it has the unoriginal formula of a bunch of idiots having an even more idiotic idea of spending the night somewhere scary.  There nothing in this movie that hasn’t been seen before and it gives very little scares, if any at all. It’s very predictable from start to finish, and if you never watch this film, you’re not missing anything.   I will leave you with my favorite, confusing one liner of the film, “It doesn’t matter if you believe in ghosts Penny, they believe in you!”  WTF does that mean?!