Review of The Beach House

Honestly there isn't much to say about this one, but having wasted the time to sit through the whole thing I desire the slight vindication of a review. This movie is basically the recent (and very well done) Color Out Of Space if every aspect of it sucked. The Beach House technically falls into the category of "slow burn" due to languid pacing, yet instead of the fire growing into a worthy second or final act, it just fizzles out. Along with the pacing, the dialogue is atrocious & simplistic, and the acting is somehow even worse. The male lead is one of the worst actors I've ever seen, as in Birdemic level. In order to dress up an otherwise bland film, there are a bunch of pretentious "art exhibit" style shots of the sea & water & related things which add nothing beyond trying to fool you into thinking that this movie can't be bland because it's DEEP (spoiler: it's not). The accompanying music follows suit- it's that annoying sort of art documentary noisy drone written by someone who used to write an actual genre of music but has gotten older and pretentious so now they write "abstract" music devoid of musicality because they have evolved past simpleton ideas like "music theory" and "sounding good". Nothing is explained or expounded upon, and so the movie is simply a series of events that just sort of happen arbitrarily, most of them lacking any purpose or connection to other scenes. The first part of the movie is about the two main characters at a beach house (there is some muddled dialogue about what is going on with the house and who it belongs to which makes you think there might be something sinister afoot, but it actually doesn't matter in any way). Other than the girl having to pull a worm thing out of her foot (why? where did it come from? what are the rules of this infection/infestation? who knows!), nothing of substance happens. There are some psychedelic scenes with elements that are sort of interesting, but none of it is given any context nor does it tie into later events so...who cares. Towards the middle of the movie you will have lost interest and inevitably pulled out your phone and started browsing facebook. You won't have committed much of the first part to memory, but it's fine because almost none of it matters, nor does it move the plot forward in any meaningful way. After a while you'll notice something seems to have started to happen which brings us to the climax of the movie. In the final act the couple leaves the house and there is lot of fog accompanied by flashing lights. People start turning into zombies or whatever and we get some body horror which again is a much lesser version of Color Out Of Space. There were some cool and gross ideas, but due to the low budget those scenes are super short and the prosthetics & effects are so obviously fake that they lose their visceral intensity. Also, up to that point the movie was so unimpressive that I just couldn't bring myself to care what was happening. No explanation is ever given for what unfolds, where it came from, or why. The characters crawl around for a while and then the movie is over. The last shot is so terrible and such a perfect example of "we have no idea how to write an ending so just make one character repeat an arbitrary line of dialogue a bunch of times because it makes it DEEP". In the end, this is a pretty bland, amateur film that is neither brainy nor profound. It's not mysterious, it's just written badly and lacked the budget for convincing visuals. The only thing deep is the amount of reaching necessary to describe this as "cosmic" or "lovecraftian". I guess you could say that at it's very core, the fundamental idea here was good, but the delivery was incredibly lacking. Overall, this is typical Shudder trash and the prevalence of this type of movie on the site is exactly why I cancelled my subscription.