House of Blood

Trailer—House of Blood

House of Blood_720p(480P)

source: House of Blood

A very professional movie from the former "ultra-gore" auteur (Premutos ,The burning moon)Olaf Ittenbach. Chain Reaction (aka House of Blood) is a professional, good looking 35 mm film, with car crashing, great makeup and gore FX but it lacks in entertainment value. I mean, its very boring and confusing. The plot is very hard to follow and the action scenes comes only in bits (when they come are cool with gore and blood, but its a very talkie movie, and the dialogs sucks. Premutos was a great low budget movie. Then Ittembach entered more mainstream. The "fromdusktilldawnesque" Legion of the Dead was pretty cool and entertaining, but stuff like this or Riverplay make me think if i will watch a new Ittembach movie. 4/10 for the good productions values only.

HOUSE OF BLOOD appears to be a slightly higher budget and more "mainstream" film from director Olaf (PREMUTOS, BURNING MOON, GARDEN OF LOVE, etc...) Ittenbach. Again, we have a relatively entertaining, but poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly executed splatter film. A group of convicts escape from their prison transport bus when a freak accident causes the bus to crash. The cons kill the cops on the bus and kidnap a doctor who was also involved in the crash. The group wanders into the woods and finds a cabin inhabited by a family of weirdos who turn out to be some sort or vampires. The vampires kill all of the cons but the doctor escapes. The doctor ends up heading to jail because the cops don't believe his story. During the doctor's transport, the same sort of accident happens, starting the whole ball rolling again... Honestly, the concept was OK the first go-round, but got real dull the second time. HOUSE OF BLOOD isn't the worst thing I've seen, and it does have a few splattery moments - but sitting through the pathetic acting and retarded storyline is pretty tedious. Worth a look if you're a big Ittenbach fan, or if you dig cheezy low-budget horror - otherwise, pass on this one...5/10

We don't often rent movies. We have DirecTV with HBO, Starz and Encore channels so we Tivo many movies and make best of what we pay monthly fee for. This month Blockbuster sent a coupon for $1.99 deal for movie rentals until end of December. I had seen previews of this movie on Black Dahlia DVD and it looked like it might be a good horror movie. Boy, was I mistaken. This was one of the worst movies I've seen in I don't know how long. The acting was really horrible. The story line ... for lack of a better word ... stupid. The movie made no sense to us and the flashback between current time and past wasn't necessary. During the movie I kept saying I couldn't believe I'm wasting time that I can never get back. Also wasted $1.99 of hard-earned money for this useless piece of garbage. I can't recommend this movie to anyone ... if it airs on cable or DirecTV and you can see it there, judge for yourself ... but don't waste money renting this.

This is one of the most unintentionally funny movies I have ever seen. The script defies logic and the acting is the worst I have seen in quite some time. I am still scratching my head and trying to figure out what they really wanted to do with this movie besides just be a really bad gore movie. Somehow a dead crow falls and hits a rock which rolls and down a hill and hits a doctors windshield which makes him crash into a bus transporting prisoners. The prisoners take him hostage and set out through the woods. Every at this point has heavy European accents and the background is obviously set around Germany, yet we are told that we are in Seattle! Okay, I guess? Well from there they walk into a fog and come out and there is an old cottage filled with people straight out of the 1700s. They speak like an olden time Yoda. We soon find out that these people are like vampires but look more like a a hairless werewolf/vampire hybrid if that makes sense. We have the standard slaughter scene of everyone but the doctor and this one female member of the tribe who has her inner vampire under control and helps him escape. The cops catch up to the doctor and take him into custody. He has all the blood of the victims on his shoes but they can't find the house, so of course they are going to send him to jail. All the while we keep getting these black and white flashbacks of the doctor as a kid trading a toy clown to the female from the cottage for a cross that she gives him with a dog laying in between them. Now we are in yet another bus transporting criminals. One of the men setting in the back of the bus says one of the funniest, unintentional gut busters of the year. We tries to pull off a thick southern accent and says "ahhh you don't wanna talk to Georgy Porgy". I laughed so hard that I had to pause the movie for at least 20 minutes. The bus makes it to the same stretch of road when, you guessed it, another dead crow falls, hits another rock which rolls that spooks a deer into running out in front of a car and she hits the bus. Rinse and repeat. Now we have the doctor yet again in the woods with more convicts heading straight for the cottage again. In one of the oddest scenes in a movie, when they reach the cottage one of the convicts says I can see it all now and we see his thoughts in which he is drinking, raping women, throwing money around and smoking cigars. After this scene the doctor says "no it will go more like this" and we see his thought process of them all getting slaughtered. So did he read the guys mind or what? Anyways, the group enters the cabin, we have a very weird scene of the doctor removing a bullet from one of the convicts scrotum. What makes this scene weird is there is twangy country music playing the whole time that really does not fit the moment. Once the monsters make it there we have the typical slaughter scene, with one exception that really left me perplexed. Everything in this house is from the 1700s, yet one of the convicts just casually bends down and picks up and chainsaw which starts with one pull of the string and starts sawing people. So this family lives like the 1700's, does everything that way, all their tools is that way, yet they have a gas powered chainsaw? Now were at the ending in which the doctor and the girl escapes. They make it to the road in which the doctor for some reason stands in the middle of the road with his eyes closed until, you guessed it, he is hit by a car which causes another bus crash. Only this time the girl is hit also and when she opens her eyes she is one of the monsters now. *sigh* I guess this means a sequel is unfortunately in the works. We cut to another black and white scene of the doctor full grown talking to the girl with the dog still between them and he thanks her. Wonder if the state ever decided to check into this one stretch of road and see why so many bus crashes happen there and lose so many criminals there?

I could not really make head nor tail out of this horror film. Or so-called horror film. It starts when a bus carrying convicted prisoners to jail, crashes. The convicts escape but take an old doctor with them because a prisoner's brother has been hurt in the accident, and they want to make sure he's okay. After a lot of needless swearing, countless "f" words (about 1,000), they come across an old village from about two centuries back, inhabited by vampires. It gets dark, the vampires attack and kill the convicts except for the doctor who escapes. He is then convicted and sent to jail for supposedly murdering the other convicts, but really it was the vampires. If that wasn't bad enough, he is then transported to prison in a van which - get this - crashes. The same thing happens. Different convicts escaping with the doctor, who leads them all to the same village where the vampires are. Havoc erupts, and err... I won't spoil the end, but let's just say, this isn't Shakespare. Almost impossibly bad, one of the worst films you will ever see. Just one out of ten.

With his early, (very) low-budget splatter films, Olaf Ittenbach proved that he could make a well constructed horror movie, despite technical limitations and a cast that obviously needed a few more acting lessons. Therefore, since it had a larger budget, I was hoping that Chain Reaction would be a leap forward in terms of overall quality for the German master of gore. But apart from a some flashy CGI credits, a few crashes, and the presence of a 'real' actor (Jurgen Prochnow), not a lot has changed. In fact, to be honest, the acting is actually worse than usual, and the script... well, it maketh me laugh! A dead crow drops from a tree to the ground and dislodges a rock, which hits a car (belonging to a doctor), that crashes into a bus-load of violent criminals, who escape into the woods (taking the doctor hostage) and eventually wind up in a house occupied by weird religious folk (who speaketh in ye olde dialect), who then transform into flesh-eating demons. Phew! To be fair, I like the initial premise—that something as insignificant as a dead bird falling from a tree can set off a series of dreadful events—but unfortunately, so does Ittenbach. A lot. So much so, that he uses the idea three times within his film! After his captors are all killed, the good doctor escapes, only to run into the arms of the law, who suspect him of foul play and decide to keep him under lock and key whilst they investigate. The doctor is put on a DOC bus to be transferred to jail, and, guess what happens..... that's right—a dead crow drops from a tree to the ground and dislodges a rock, which hits a car, that crashes into the bus-load of violent criminals... and so on. And when a third dead crow causes even more trouble later on, one wonders whether it might be wise just to cut down all of the trees along this stretch of road, to bring down the accident rate. As always with an Ittenbach film, there is plenty of gruesome gore on display (with some very nasty crushed heads being the most sickening of these), but with quite a long running time, there are also periods in which the film is just too 'dry'. Some of these moments offer some (presumably) unintentional laughs (the aforementioned olde English spoken by the demon people is hilarious), but other parts are just plain dull. Jurgen Prochnow is given nothing much to do, there is lots of mundane chit-chat, and the whole 'deja-vu' angle quickly starts to irritate. Ittenbach is a director who has shown a lot of promise in the past; he certainly knows how to put together a decent gore scene. Perhaps, in future, if he gets a reasonable amount of dosh to spend, he should invest in a decent scriptwriter and get a better cast. I'm sure he has a horror 'classic' somewhere up his sleeve, however, on the strength of this effort, it's hard to believe.

Olaf is Germany's sfx-wonder. And he is an amateur in making movies. He started with video-home-movie-horror-events with incredible sfx which looks like the best days of Lucio Fulcio or the Hellraiser movies. But script, directing actors and dialogs are not his profession. I know that he is thinking that directing is his profession, but that is not true...look his movies. This movie is also a small-big-budget-amateur-movie with on a high trash-level and a lot of unmeant comedy. But there is a lot of splatter and gore sfx on a high level. Jürgen Prochnow has a small part in this movie and the only reason for it is, that he want to give this movie a chance because of his name. The story and setting is always the same in a Ittenbach movie: the hell, the dead, maniacs, zombies, rednecks and some stupid heroes with some lame Tarantiono-dialogs.