What we get in The Sickhouse is ninety minutes of people fumbling around in the dark waiting to die.
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They say the only things in life you can depend on are death and taxes. They forgot about straight-to-video horror movies. Another thing you can depend on: People confusing us with the title of a straight-to-video horror movie. This 2007 entry is called "The Sickhouse," a single word, but that didn't stop the Internet Movie Database from calling it "The Sick House" or the U.K. where its working titles were "The Host" and "The Prey." Whatever. A garlic bulb by any other name would smell as bad.
OK, you say you've seen "The Blair Witch Project" and the new "House on Haunted Hill"? Apparently, so did co-writer and director Curtis Radclyffe ("Sweet Angel Mine") because those are the films he borrows from most heavily in "The Sickhouse." You get the same dark atmospherics, the same long, shadowy passageways, the same dull, murky color scheme, and the same quick edits and herky-jerky photography. As far as the movie having a plot or characterizations or personal interactions or dialogue, like the other two films, it virtually doesn't have any. What we get in "The Sickhouse" is ninety minutes of people fumbling around in the dark waiting to die.
Gina Philips ("Jeepers Creepers") stars as Anna, a young archaeologist working on the site of a seventeenth-century London orphanage, Ludgate, known to have been a "plague house," a place where those in charge took in plague victims. Supposedly, a legend associated with the old place says that an infamous doctor worked there, a murderous monk who started a cult of "Black Priests" who killed children. Anyway, Anna and her team are excavating, and she finds a sealed chamber in the basement. But wouldn't you know it--the city's Public Health Department is going to shut down the whole operation and demolish the building because they found remnants of the plague there. What's a poor girl to do?
What Anna does is sneak into the decaying building in the dead of night, just before the city is going to tear it down, and break into the secret chamber. She's undeterred by the risk of spreading disease to all the city because, you know, archeology comes first. True to horror-movie form, she unwittingly unleashes unspeakable supernatural horrors into the world.
And just as you would expect, a group of four lunkheaded young people happen by the place at the same time that Anna unleashes the evil within. The young folks get into a hit-and-run accident in the street outside the orphanage and, fearing the police, take refuge inside. Then all the doors and windows close and lock, and there's no way out.
So there you have it. With Anna and the four other young people (one of whom is pregnant) trapped inside the building (along with a couple of security guards), the malevolent spirits have a whole bevy of people to slaughter.
There's nothing new in this film, nothing we haven't seen any number of times before. Even the movie's preamble is derivative of numerous other fright films: We hear a child whispering some mumbo-jumbo in a darkened hallway, while indecipherable voices chatter on around her, followed by the opening titles and some of the most dreadful, loud rock music imaginable.
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