'The Curse of Hobbes House'
(Mhairi Calvey, Waleed Elgadi, Makenna Guyler, Kevin Leslie, Jo Price, et al / DVD / R / 2020 / 4Digital Media)
Overview: After the death of her Aunt, Jane Dormant travels to the family’s remote, ancestral home hoping to receive a large inheritance.
When Jane’s estranged, half-sister Jennifer arrives at Hobbes House to claim her part of the estate, the sisters’ simmering hate ignites.
But then a violent, unexpected storm cuts the estate off from outside help and a wave of bloodthirsty zombies lays siege. Now the sisters have to learn how to fight back together.
DVD Verdict: When Jane Dormant (Mhairi Calvey, 'Braveheart,' 'Crystal's Shadow') is at her wit's end trying to make ends meet, she learns about the death of her aunt Alex.
Expecting some potential benefits from the inheritance Jane makes her way to her grandmother's remote estate, Hobbes House, to attend the reading of the will.
When Jane arrives at the estate she finds herself face to face with her estranged but successful half-sister Jennifer Dormant (Makenna Guyler, 'David and Goliath'), who has brought along her lover Nigel Thatcher (Kevin Leslie, 'The Rise of the Krays), an investment banker from London.
The only other people attending are Eurydice Saul (Jo Price, 'Doctors'), the solicitor and Naser Mohammedin (Waleed Elgadi, 'A Hologram of the King'), a Syrian refugee, who worked as the groundskeeper for Jane and Jennifer's late grandmother.
The reading of the will gets harshly interrupted when Saul is killed in a gruesome accident. When a storm cuts off the estate from the outside world, Jane is attacked by the reanimated corpse of Saul.
Things spiral more and more out of control and soon enough the group faces a horde of bloodthirsty undead corpses seeking to kill!
Shot at a location ie: really big mansion that is actually an event space in the UK that gets rented out all the time, it's funny to know that as hair raising and as - at times - gruesomely down and dirty as this film is, to make the tight schedule work, crew and cast had to work around several wakes, kids birthdays, conventions and graduation ceremonies that were also booked there!
Shot in just 18 days on location close to Bristol, it's reported that Writer/Director Juliane Block (this being her third movie in which she incorporates songs of singer-songwriter Georgie Fisher; the others being both '8 Remains' and '3 Lives') took on the challenge of the very tight schedule under the condition that she could shoot without bigger location moves.
And this most definitely worked in her favor, as 'The Curse of Hobbes House' is a tightly woven, darkly and dimly lit horror movie that works based on all that crammed cinematic styling, allowing a densely compact crew to come together against the uprising of evil.
Trust me, George A. Romero would have been very proud to call this film his own back in the day!
Oh, and in closing, for all you fans of Easter Eggs, hidden in the background of several scenes is a small Playmobile figurine called Bob. It's a toy of Block's son that she placed on every set as a shout-out to him! This is a Widescreen Presentation (2.35:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs.
'The Curse of Hobbes House' will be available on VOD & Digital HD On Leading Digital Platforms and DVD on December 15th, 2020.
