Premise: A theater troupe prepares for an interactive play at the curse Abaddon Hotel.
This is a really nice return to form for the series. The first Hell House LLC blew me away and instantly become one of my favorite horror movies. The second movie struggled a bit to figure out what worked from the formula for the first movie. It tried to be a little too polished which is death in the found footage style*. I still really enjoyed the movie, only with more reservations.
*It takes very little money to make something look like a home video. It takes considerably more money to make something look like a real news broadcast or more.
Lake of Fire doesn't overthink things. It's more or less just doing the first movie over again**. It's a different group of people preparing for a show at the hotel and shit goes down on opening night. It doesn't offer much that's new, but it effectively mines all the things that work in the original. It was annoying how much it called back clips from the first two movies to remind the audience of what people are talking about. It's like this was made assuming people hadn't seen the first two movies. That's not the kind of series this is though. It's pretty serialized. I wish they would've been more sparring in their reliance on it.
**Now that I think about it. It's a similar series arc to the Ocean's trilogy.
I'm a little less interested in where things end. I imagine this is meant to be the final movie in the series now that Russell stopped the lake of fire or whatever. I never really knew or cared about what was causing the Abaddon Hotel to be scary. Getting too deep into it creates the same problem that Paranormal Activity ran into. It's a nice enough twist though with Russell looking like the villain until the end. I enjoy how with the spell broken, all the old victims survive, but Russell and the group from the original are still stuck there. And their response to learning that is funny. They barely seem to care.
Even with these issues though, the Hell House LLC series remains at the top of my horror series list. Excellent use of found footage. Nice mythology. Great setup for a lot of scares. It's also, as of when I'm writing this, one of the few movies I've written about with no Wikipedia page. In a way, that's as scary as any movie I'll see.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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