Hell House LLC Lineage (2025)
the fifth time isn’t the charm
Hell House LLC Lineage is the fifth installment in the Hell House franchise and the first to abandon the series’ found footage format in favor of traditional filming. It’s also the first entry to receive a (limited) theatrical release. Did this attempt to lift the franchise from minor cult favorite to mainstream success work? Unfortunately, the answer is hell no!
The main protagonist is Vanessa (Elizabeth Vermilyea), a returning character from the third movie. She’s now a local bar owner. Why the franchise would bring back a character from the much-derided third installment is anyone’s guess, but that’s just one of many baffling choices that the filmmakers have made.
Vanessa is still haunted by her past traumas and has terrifying visions of the hotel. She’s not alone in this regard. Other people around town are also having visions.
When a series of unexplained deaths occur, Vanessa launches an investigation to discover the origin of the evil that haunts Abaddon. She encounters some of the surviving characters from the far superior fourth installment, The Carmichael Manor. There’s plenty of callbacks to that movie, which is fun, but it also reminds us of this installment’s inferiority.
Hell House LLC Lineage makes the same mistake as some of the later Saw sequels: too much heavy exposition. When we’re watching a horror movie, we’re looking for thrills, not endless explanations about series mythology. Only the most hardcore fans will care about all the intricate plot details and connections here (frankly, I didn’t understand, nor care, about many of them).
If there’s one thing you could count on with the previous movies, which were uneven in quality (I enjoyed the first and fourth installments), is that they would provide creepy atmosphere and fun amusement park haunted house-style jumps. This one is just boring. There’s a decent amount of Halloween/Autumn vibes, but not enough to recreate the eerie feeling of the best Hell House movies.
The acting is uniformly bland and stiff. The characters seem sleepy and bored, which is obviously the last thing you want in a movie like this. The dialogue is clunky. There’s unintentionally funny lines like “I wake up every day with a dead girl in bed next to me.”
Stephen Cognetti, who directed all the previous installments, struggles with helming a conventionally shot movie. He was much better at shooting found footage. Unlike before, Cognetti is never able to build up any tension or suspense. He makes corny decisions to try to increase the story’s intensity, like shooting characters from far away to simulate the sensation of them being watched. It doesn’t work.
The creepy clown statue is back. It still looks cool, but this movie makes the mistake of having it (minor spoiler alert) move on camera. Instead of making the statue even scarier, it just makes it look silly. This guy ain’t Pennywise or Art the Clown. It’s better when it’s moving offscreen.
The directing, writing, and acting are amateurish. Lineage is like what a group of college freshman film students would make if they were asked to create a Hell House knockoff. Yes, it’s that bad.
Lineage has a cheesy soap opera feel. This is especially true in the final scene. Despite being billed as the last installment of the franchise, Lineage concludes with a silly and completely unsatisfying cliffhanger that sets up a storyline few fans are likely to care about.
At least Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare seemed to offer some closure. There is none of that here whatsoever.
Rating
Hell House LLC Lineage is a misbegotten installment that wholly lacks the creepy atmosphere that made its predecessors memorable. I didn’t think anything would surpass Wolf Man as 2025’s worst horror film, but Lineage manages to pull off this dubious feat.
Rating from 1 (avoid at all costs) to 10 (masterpiece) 3
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