The Halfway House (2004)

"Young girls are disappearing in and around the Mary Magdalen Halfway House for Troubled Girls. Desperate to find out what became of her sister, Larissa Morgan (Janet Tracy Keijser from HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL) goes undercover to infiltrate the Catholic-run institution. Once inside, she encounters Father Fogerty, a priest with a passion for punishment; Sister Cecelia, a nun with a dark past plotting an even blacker future; Edwina and her love-toy Cherry Pie; tough Latino Angelina and her home girls and a sinister handyman named Lutkus. It's not long before she's caught up in a twisted web of sadism, violence, and wanton lust before finally learning the ultimate secret of the Halfway House."

What a load of crap. I hope this was intended as a comedy even though it isn't intentionally funny by any stretch of the imagination.

There's only one really pretty girl in this film - Janet Tracy Keijser. Unfortunately, she does the most ridiculously unerotic sex scene I've ever seen quite early on in the film and talks all through it!

All the others have tattoos everywhere, nipple rings and other pierced nastiness which just turns me off more than the thought of being tied up with a washing line and having a bottle of Sarson's Malt Vinegar shoved in my mouth. Ewww! What the hell is wrong with women today?

There are a couple of "lesbian" scenes in the film but for the reason above I didn't find anything titillating about them. I expect someone somewhere does though. They were hardly "hardcore" anyway and were over pretty fast. I'm not even going to mention the acting, or lack of it.

If this is a horror then I suppose it would have to be a "comedy-horror". A few mentions of H.P. Lovecraft throughout seem to indicate that the one-eyed trouser snake, I mean "monster", in the cellar is supposed to have been summoned with the Necronomicon or some such nonsense.

There isn't all that much gore though there is one good scene when some baldy headed freakshow with a spider tattooed on his scalp gets decapitated. Apart from that, I'd give this a miss if I was you.

I'll give it 1 out of 10 for persisting all the way to 90 minutes. Supposedly it took $100,000 to do so. What the hell did they spend the money on?

This is without doubt the most turgid, unerotic and goreless "exploitation" movie I have ever had the misfortune to watch.