Movie review: Lameness haunts this 'House'

"House" is a thriller that ponders that age-old question: Can you still make a "Christian"-themed horror movie?

Horror movies often play around with the big themes of guilt, sin and redemption, and are often set in a sort of purgatory of morality, free will and moral choices. What would the "Saw" franchise be without the guilt and punishment ethos at the heart of it?

So "House" isn't a stretch. Take away its absurd R rating (the film barely warrants a PG-13), and this adaptation of a Ted Dekker novel would seem right at home at any B-movie horror convention.

It's just not very good.

A simple allegory about two guilt-ridden couples trapped in the Wayside Inn with the murderous proprietors inside and the masked, shotgun-wielding Tin Man outside trying to break in, it's one of those indie cheapies helped by the addition of a "name" to the cast. But it's thrown utterly out of balance by putting that "name" into a bit part.

Michael Madsen ("Kill Bill") is the rural Alabama sheriff who sends writer Jack and would-be country singer Stephanie, played by Reynaldo Rosales and Heidi Dippold, on a "shortcut to the interstate."

The couple are on edge, arguing, and Jack is speeding. They get a flat tire; it starts to rain. Before you can say "It was a dark and stormy night," they've hiked up to the Wayside, met another couple (Julie Ann Emery, J.P. Davis) and begun to face not just the freak-show clichés who run the inn, but their own deepest fears and regrets.

The cast is rather lukewarm on the material, perhaps reflecting the amount of thought that went into the title.

And Madsen's presence in the opening makes you certain that he has some role to play other than as a misdirecting lawman.