Revew: ‘Hell House LLC: Lineage’ perfectly caps the found footage series

When it was announced that Hell House LLC‘s concluding chapter would not be found footage, I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure a traditionally shot film could work. I’m glad I was wrong. Stephen Cognetti’s Hell House LLC: Lineage surpasses every expectation – and then some. While expanding upon what came before, it also does a nice job of tying up all the loose ends, connecting the dots between characters, and offering a reason behind all the bloodshed. The filmmaking might be crisp, too clean – but Cognetti still packs in all the thrills and chills you could want.

Vanessa Shepherd (Elizabeth Vermilyea), the reporter from Hell House LLC III: Lake of Fire, finds herself racked with nightmares, the ghoulish kind that forces her wandering the halls of The Abaddon Hotel all over again. She can barely keep her life together, as she tells her therapist. As she deals with her trauma, the dreams should cease, Dr. Farrell (Felicia Curry) promises. But they don’t. They only grow in frequency and severity. Something leads her back to the ruins of Abaddon and subsequently to the Carmichael Manor. She soon discovers all its deepest and darkest secrets. As she untangles the mystery behind the decades-long bloodbath, traced back to a single tragic event in 1989, more bodies pile up around her.

How does she connect to The Abaddon Hotel? What is it about the Carmichael Manor that draws her so? Vanessa, bolstered by a strong lead performance from Vermilyea, begins putting together scattered pieces that reveal a larger puzzle. Maybe then she can overcome whatever is harbored beneath the floorboards and extricate herself from unbelievable night terrors. The past is far from finished and quickly catches up to the present in a way that you may not expect. Once you get the full picture, everything clicks into place.

Cognetti reapplies his well-learned found footage tricks into a surprisingly frightful conclusion. It’s as engaging as the 2015 original and the series’ refreshing fourth installment. You might expect an ongoing franchise to completely bottom out by the fifth entry, but the writer/director proves that it’s possible to continue solid storytelling all the way to the finish line. Where the series lost its luster with the second and third films, Lineage makes those entries interesting enough to revisit. In a marathon setting, the five films fit nicely together and allow a crash course into all the names involved with The Abaddon Hotel and Carmichael Manor. It’s not Saw levels of convoluted with the timeline and characters, but you might want to craft a handy-dandy diagram to get all the names straight in your head.

As Shakespeare once wrote, parting is such sweet sorrow. It was time for the series to end; it’ll always remain some of the best found footage we’ve ever seen. With the help of his creative team, Stephen Cognetti gives Hell House LLC one helluva send-off and ties it all up in a neat little package. Now, I’ll be able to sleep through the night without dreaming about those damn clowns…