Review #136: The Halfway House (2004)

Cast/Notable Credits:
Kenneth Hall (Director): Evil Spawn (1987), Ghost Writer (1989), Night Visit (2007)

Mary Woronov (Sister Cecelia): Night of the Comet (1984), Terror Vision (1986), Chopping Mall (1986), The Devil’s Rejects (2005)

Janet Tracy Keijser (Larissa Morgan): House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Athena Demos (Angelea): Camp Utopia (2002)

Saye Yabandeh (Shelby): Single Black Female (2009)

Trailer:
Trailer Link
Plot:

A young hot blonde (Annie) leaves her house to go jogging around Los Angeles. She later turns down an isolated alley and is abducted by a cloaked man. Soon afterwards, Annie finds herself tied down to the floor on top of a mysterious cult design and sacrificed to a monster hell beast that dwells in a basement. Lookin' good so far!

Annie’s sister, Larissa, goes to the police to report her sister missing and discovers that there might be a connection to her disappearance to another case of missing girls. It's a very loose connection to the other missing girls. The connection is the Mary Magdalen Halfway House for Troubled girls. Unfortunately none of them look like this girl:(

The Catholic school girl’s halfway house is suspect for numerous disappearances, but the police do not believe they can properly investigate a house ran by a bunch of religious fanatics and they don’t have too much evidence against them.

Larissa decides to go “undercover” and take refuge in the halfway house doing an investigation of her own. Larissa makes up a cover story and gets accepted into the halfway house. She battles the elements as she tries to blend in with the other “troubled” girls living at Mary Magdalen’s.

Over her stay chicks duke it out with one another, lesbians have sex, the Father of the house spanks some bad girls and more girls go missing and are fed to the basement hell beast…basically…it’s a fun ride!

Villain:

The main killer of the film is some-thousand year old hell beast that dwells behind some door in the basement of the halfway house. The Necronomicon refers to the beast as one of the “Old Ones”. The monster is basically a huge slug with tentacles. Think of that slug in the movie Starship Troopers, but with tentacles…crappy green rubbery looking tentacles.

It has a single gleaming red eye in the center of its hexagon shaped head. Just below the eye is the monster’s mouth, filled with big, fake looking bad teeth. After extensive research into the beast, its called Yog Sothoth. Huh? Surprised that I did extensive research or a hell beast is named Yog? To be honest, it looks like the film producers went to a high school float committee and gave them a $100 budget to construct the beast. I shall call it the Slugo the Hell Beast.

The mastermind behind the evil plot is Sister Cecelia. She’s the Catholic nun who pretty much runs the halfway house. We learn over the course of the film, that her previous gig was at an All-Boys school, where the boys turned on her and gang raped her.

As part of her revenge on the world, she has decided to raise and unleash Slugo the Hell Beast onto the world for all of the wrong doings. On top of the plot, she wants to mate with the beast and become the mother of the offspring(s) that will eventually rule the world.

Helping Sister Cecelia abduct and feed women to Slugo the Hell Beast is the halfway house’s janitor/handyman, Lutkus. He’s some fat, loser reject pervert that loves sniffin’ the victims’ panties. Lutkus is also the “muscle” of the operation.

Cast:

The cast of the film centers around two key characters, Larissa (Janet Tracy Keijser pictured right) and Detective Sheen. Larissa is on a quest to find out what happened to her missing sister, and Sheen is the detective she is secretly working with. This also is where the Skin-e-max element of the film sets in.

It’s pretty hard…That’s what she said!...to imagine a distraught sister going over the details to a undercover plan with a detective while she’s riding him in bed. They calmly discuss the details during sex and trade positions as if nothing emotionally devastating is going on. I’m not even going to discuss all the tongue and cheek dialogue that surrounds Detective Sheen’s first name…Dick.

As for the “troubled” women at the halfway house…they’re not good at all. First of all, they don’t wear the Catholic school girl outfits. WTF!? It’s a Catholic themed halfway house! Instead they look like what female inmates would wear if they didn’t have to wear the prison issued clothing.

Secondly, the film did a good job of employing skanky looking, bad acting female actresses would are happy to show off their knockers. I’m not saying it’s a bad concept, but when you can see the badly concealed surgical scars on their racks, it’s kind of a turn off.

SFX/Gore:

Halfway House can be considered…a low budget film. The special effects department does not shy from that statement. Outside of Slugo looking…pretty fake there was not much invested in the film’s special effects. As I think about it more, there wasn’t much outside of the “offerings”. One dude had his head chopped off, but even that was horrible looking. It looked like pretty primitive, cheap CGI effects. Isn't a chick with a gun hot?

There were nine deaths in the film, and the majority all seemed the same. A girl gets captured, stripped of her clothes, tied to the floor, and then consumed by the hell beast (large part of that was just the tentacles wrapping themselves around the victim and pulling her to the mouth). We actually got to see one girl get “chopped”. Don’t get too excited, it was just a spraying of blood when she was half submerged in the beast’s mouth.

TNA:

What the film lacked in budget, they made up in breasts…and sex…and SM. Cutting to the chase, ten girls show their racks in the film. I would say just about every girl on screen with the exception of Sister Cecelia, but there were a couple of extras that never made it out of one or two scenes. If one of those two scenes wasn’t the group shower scene, then…no luck with showing the goods. That’s a lot of racks! But then again the film wasted its budget on chicks who can’t act, but are willing to do anything else sexual. And that’s good too! By the way, the best rack came with the first chick in the film, Annie. Then they all slowly go downhill from there.

Outside of the standard knocker portion of the TNA section, the film was pretty open to all other types of fetishes. Along with the bondage fetish, there was the spanking fetish. The padre of the halfway house, Father Fogerty, had a paddle with the word “Jesus” engraved in diamonds on it. Fogerty used his paddle to punish the bad girls of the film. As he spanked away, the bad girls muttered, “The power of Christ compels me!” Sweet.

But wait!

That’s not all!

Have I mentioned that there were a couple of sex scenes? Well I did now. And not just a little man on woman action, but we also got to see a female go down on another.

And the film still wasn’t done!

There were still some Skin-e-max rocks left unturned. So let’s turn them over! There were a couple of chicks fighting and wrestling, and an almost raped by a Virgin Mary statue scene. Yep the film went that low. In the deleted scenes there were two chicks about to get in on with a strap on…and why was that left out?

T.Gun Factor:

The film was Skin-e-max blended with a horror movie. As Miley Cyrus would sing, “It’s the best of both worlds”. The film had no real value itself, but it was enjoyable enough to watch once. Maybe twice, depending on how desperate you are at watching that on screen.

Hey, I’m just saying that if I had two or three video cameras and a dozen girls willing to show their racks off in a film, then this flick wouldn’t be too far off from what I would produce. I'm just pissed that someone beat me to it! But in today's era, all I have to say is...sequel? Hmm.

I hope that I could do a little bit better in some of the areas. One of the areas would be something simple, like not naming a girl, “Cherry Pie.” Really? One of the main characters name is Cherry Pie, can’t you see the Skin-e-max element. All of these photos came up during a google search of cherry pie. Which one doesn't belong? Hint: the one on the far right.

Overall, The Halfway House is a goofy film that would be fun to watch hammered with a couple of friends. The acting is horrible and the special effects aren't too much better, but it's worth at least a small chunk of your time.

Misc. Movie Trivia:
-Film opened on August 23, 2005 and went straight to DVD
-Filmed in Los Angeles, CA