Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

GazerRise Fantastic!

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Scarecrow-88 A suburban house with multiple rooms, a pool out back and a chilling history of violence and death is purchased by Jim(John Wintergate who wrote and directed it)who rents it out to a number of women needing a place to stay. Victoria(Kalassu)is a model who falls for Jim and her secret nemesis is the mysterious Dee(Alexander Day), often seen digging in the yard. Victoria begins to practice "meta-physics" exercises after becoming inspired by levitation tricks performed by Jim who can move objects with the power of thought. Meanwhile members of the boardinghouse fall prey to supernatural forces which guide them to horrible demises. Something evil rests within the estate of this boardinghouse and Victoria suffers from a series of eerie nightmares where hands rise from an inferno-like hole in her bed, and some red-eyed mass of black pursues her. This red-eyed fiend is often shown appearing right before innocents are murdered. Eyes are gouged, a hand is caught in a garbage disposal with blood squirting all over the place, a person removes his guts, a victim is forced to shoot an innocent party goer and then himself, and a cat is bashed in the head with a hammer. While we realize that something beyond the natural is motivating the blood shed, there's also a physical presence also committing crime. Who is the vessel being used by the evil entity and can it be stopped? There's also a sub-plot regarding a woman, raped previously by her fiancé, who is shaken when the man she left behind finds her "hiding place." Painful in it's amateurishness, Wintergate's film proves that not everyone has an ability to make a sound film of particular quality. Being shot on video with endless scenes that either go on too long or are cut before characters can finish their dialogue, "Boardinghouse" reeks of a lack of professional film-making ability. Wintergate does line himself with a group of ladies willing to go the extra mile for his little movie. It looks like it was shot with a camcorder, made by friends in the suburbs or just outside a city(..or in a few vacated buildings within a city)for like 10,000 dollars. It features a rotating synth soundtrack and home-made grue. The film is at times quite claustraphobically confined within rooms of the title setting. The film features no-names with a desire to enter the film-making business. It, to me, was made when a gathering of friends at a gettogether decided to say, "let's go make a movie." I'm surprised films like this are distributed, but I often wonder what Wintergate might do with the proper funding with an ability to shoot films cheap on digital. There's a market and audience for films like "Boardinghouse" and Code Red delivers a fun interview with Wintergate and Kalassu on the DVD release. This film will undoubtedly work best for fans of rancid cinema who are interested in what these type of people dressed like(..and drove)in the early 80's. The sensibilities of these characters also expose what the 80's was all about. Many of the girls in Wintergate's cast go topless, including one really weird scene in the shower where blood leaks down the dirty tiles of a shower as one of the females is showering. Also a funny scene where Jim moves a bar of soap with his power of concentration for Victoria before dragging her in the bathtub!

gavcrimson Along with the similarly Z-grade 'Black Devil Doll from Hell', Boarding House is one of the earliest and most infamous American horror films to be shot on videotape. Legend has it that it even played in a few US cinemas, so has an odd shot on video but transferred to 35mm film look to it, that was hyped by the producers as 'filmed in horror vision', which probably sounds better on the poster than filmed in washed out home movie vision.Jim (played by "Hawk Adly" a.k.a. director John Wintergate) inherits a house with a sinister past depicted by some pre-credits gore and a computer print out basically telling us everybody who has lived in the house has died about 48 hours after moving in. In spite of this Jim decides to reopen the house and rent out the rooms. Being a bachelor he's only interested in a certain type of tenant though. In reality no one would surely anyone answer an Ad that reads "Girls, if you're between eighteen and twenty five, unattached and beautiful, then I want you to share my ten bedroom house with me". This being film world however, soon the house is full of such female tenants, headed by an actress billed only as "Kalassu", who spend most of the film running around in bikinis, having cat fights and generally providing senseless T&A.There is more to Jim than meets the eye though, he also has psychic powers which he has learnt by many hours of meditating in his underwear and listening to 'teach yourself psychic powers' audio tapes. After Jim amazes Kalassu by making a bar of soap move, she too tries to develop psychic abilities. At first the pair harmlessly show off their powers, cue a psychic custard pie fight, but soon Amityville Horror type accidents start befalling the girls, a levitating knife stabs a girl in the hand, a hairdryer falls in the bath frying another character. As well as someone's more unusual idea of horror movie incidents, like the nightmare scene in which one of the girls imagines her head has turned into that of a pigs'. Is the house to blame ?, or is someone using psychic powers to bump off the girls ? Extremely gory, a character bashes her head on a rock and in the next shot is covered head to toe in blood(!), for all this Boarding House feels less like a horror film and more a duo vanity vehicle for Hawk and Kalassu. Hawk has the look of Malcolm McDowell in a Billy Idol biopic, if you can picture that, and as director gives himself lots of scenes that consist of him walking around in leopard skin Y-fronts, being fawned over by the girls and being admired for his psychic greatness. Kalassu similarly hogs the limelight, however you suspect she fancied herself more as a singer, since her rawk songs ("You say you want a rock romance, you've been begging just to get in my pants") dominate the soundtrack, and she gets to play live in the film's finale. A "whatever happened to?" computer print out at the end of the film informs us that after the incidents in the film Hawk's character went on to work for NASA while Kalassu's character is currently in the middle of a sold out world tour ….as if.There really isn't any middle ground with this one. If you've got a low tolerance for low-fi film-making, run don't walk from this, then double bolt the door, you'll find it unbearable. If you don't, then maybe, just maybe, you'll be one of the select few who can pride themselves on discovering a certain charm and unintentional hilarity to the film where others can only see awfulness, either way like the aforementioned Black Devil Doll from Hell its certainly the sort of bad movie you won't forget in a hurry. Despite the LA setting, I think its the closest we'll ever see to a 'straight' version of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, in the sense of its instantly dated 1980s vibe, the bad special effects and the misguided egotism which is clearly driving the project. The actor who plays the black cop, and who wildly overplays the scene where psychic power forces him to shoot himself, even looks a bit like Dean Lerner/Richard Ayoade.This review was based on a viewing of a ye olde ex-rental tape, such is the film's appeal that the previous owner appears to have attempted to record over the film not once, but three times. Obviously it must have been Hawk's powers that prevented his one and only film from being wiped "focus white light, focus white light" etc, etc.

lthseldy1 Oh this movie was really bad, it's one of those movies that you can't judge a movie by it's cover movie. This movie was about a playboy, Don Johnson with a bad hairdo gigolo that inherits a house haunted by the previous owners who apparently died during a party ten years ago. After the man gets settled in, he totally surrounds himself with women that look to be rejects from a cheap porno movie that couldn't get any decent roles much less acting abilty and decided to settle with this one instead. Jim, the owner of the house is into some metaphysics and involves one of the tenants with it also who is having nightmares that become obnoxious throughout the movie with her midnight screaming and unexplained flashbacks of the meaning of these dreams. In the beginning of the movie we are subjected with typing words that gave me more of a headache than this horrible movie did. During the movie we see a drunk veteran that the movie seems to place as the killer in the movie who is all but laughable in his biker suit, wig and glasses. After watching this movie, I wanted to do exactly what the victims did to themselves in this movie and that was to rip my guts out, dive in a pool and drown and I'm sure you'll feel the same way. Avoid it!

Maciste_Brother I'm watching BOARDINGHOUSE as I'm writing this and the "film" is woeful. There's almost no redeeming quality to it. It feels and looks like a porno production but without any hardcore sex scenes. In this case, the "horror" scenes have replaced the sex scenes. The film even warns you at the beginning that every shocking scene will be preceded with a warning of sorts. Funny enough, throughout the movie, people (mostly women) get killed without any warning to the viewers. The producers weren't even able to do what they promised they were going to do. Yep, the film is THAT cheap.The only thing one can credit this film of being is that it's one of the first direct-to-video "film" specifically made for the booming video market of the early 1980s. Today, they're dime a dozen. So, I guess the producers of the film were ahead of the times in this regard. But that still doesn't change the fact that BOARDINGHOUSE is devoid of acting, a script, special effects or any suspense or fright whatsoever. I can't even tell who is supposed to be who. You do see a lot of women sans clothes (all natural breasts, no less) and guys in bikinis. Ah, the 1980s.