Hell House LLC: Lineage (2025)
- Red Rose Horror
- Aug 21
- 3 min read
The decision to make the most recent installment of Hell House LLC, titled Lineage, a regular movie rather than a found footage movie raised doubts and questions from initial announcement. While other Hell House installments opted to lean into the hoke and charm of a low budget film that was palpatable through a found footage style this newest installment set out to take the story deeper and open storytelling possibilities to a new level not available in the prior format. My takeaway is that this was a huge mistake and lacked a fundamental understanding of what people sought from the prior films. Unfortunately I spent the night of August 20th in the shittiest theater in town (the only one that is an AMC and thus had the early theatrical release of the new movie) confused what I was even watching. Very few times in my life have myself or my husband decided that a movie wasn't worth sitting in the theater to complete it and instead left but this is one of those time, I walked out about 40 minutes into the movie.
After fighting to stay awake while also being misled by AMC that 25-30 minutes of trailers and advertisements would play before the 7 PM showing we walked into the theater within the first 5 minutes, the movie already playing to the sparse crowd. Ourselves and three other pairs sat in uncomfortable silence as little happened on screen, neither scares nor decent plot building occured during the time I spent there. The main character, whose name I didn't really catch and I don't care to look up, didn't fit into the profile of former main characters of the franchise and my brow remained furrowed in confusion why we were even following her. Her roommate seemed half her age and I couldn't discern whether she was meant to be a college student or a young adult at a moment of redesign, neither was made clear during the movie and I felt she wasn't being made relatable enough to be an interesting character. Most of what I saw was her walking around Abbadon, the town which the movie took place and she lived, as one of the 3 clowns from the basement of Hell House followed her. The plot seemed to focus on this clown which also confused me as a fan of the other films who'd anticipated being at Hell House or at least around Hell House rather than following the clown like a slasher focused on said clown.
The main character's therapist broke HIPPA to further the plot and overshared about her other client whom she said was also seeing this clown around town, something she referred to as "Abbadon eyes" but brushed off as a shared delusion. This guy who the main character runs into in the therapist's waiting area after her own session is then followed and the clown, in less than scary fashion, appears in his house and a found footage interlude makes it clear he's been killed by the clown. When I first heard Abbadon eyes I had to turn away and stop myself from laughing at how absurd and nonsensical the story was playing out. I felt silly, which isn't something you typically want to feel when watching a horror movie that follows up a quite decent found footage franchise full of scares. I honeslty don't care what happened after this and we left around the 3rd standoff between the main character and the clown, appearing to her as a distasteful Halloween direction outside of a random home on her walk around town. I burst out laughing in the lobby after holding in my confused chuckles and ultimately felt like we'd wasted money and time, only thankful that it was a wasted Wednesday rather than a weekend.
What I can recommend is not spending money to see this movie, espeically in theaters but I would extend that to not signing up for Shudder if you're only doing so to watch Lineage. I genuinely feel this bad experience will make it difficult to enjoy the other films in the franchise, already skipping past them today when in recent weeks I'd opted to put them on in the background or as fun rewatches. I'm not sure why any of the decisions that were made were the decisions made and it's also possible I'm missing key information that could've made the watch better but this isn't a good movie. I would even tempt to say this is a bad movie and one of the worst I've seen in a while, which is unfortunate because the last few years have been stellar for horror. I'm disappointed and don't have faith in the Hell House franchise any longer.
