This movie stands out for having the most ridiculous plot twist I've ever seen.
After starting out with an Amityville-inspired prelude saying that an archeological find has revealed that "the real number of the beast is 616", and showing home security camera footage of a young man rising out of bed late at night and killing his family with a rifle, the movie moves on to a paint-by-numbers, clichéd family-moves-into-a-murder-house haunted house flick of the low caliber you might expect from any movie featuring Eric Roberts, who is famous for appearing in any movie that pays his $5000/day fee. A father and his teenage daughters movie into a surprisingly affordable mansion after the death of the mother.
But, then in what had to be a scene entirely written, filmed, and tacked on after production, in just the last 5 minutes, a "plot twist" comes from further out of left field than I've ever seen before...
Spoiler, because you should not watch this movie anyway: the entire family is revealed in the last 5 minutes to not even be a family, but be a traveling group of grifters who set up the haunted house scam so they could sue the realtor for $1,000,000 for not disclosing the house was the scene of a murder. Then one of the "daughters" kills the "father" and other "daughter", revealed in this final scene to be lovers and not father and daughter, and steals the money and leaves. A flashback, now shown for the second time, shows that as the "mother" hugged the "daughter" goodbye on her deathbed, she whispered, "Kill them before they kill you." This entirely changes the genre of the movie in the very last scene, and renders the supernatural "number of the beast" prologue totally incomprehensible, along with the numerous scenes of the "father" and "daughters" still acting like a family when nobody was around to see.
Fridge logic abounds: If they had the house's original security camera footage showing that a murder occurred in the house to show in court and win a settlement, why didn't they just use it? Why stage a haunting? And how did they even get that footage, when it was shown to have been hushed up by the town officials? And how did they stage the elaborate haunting, such as furniture moving by itself when everyone in the house was shown to be busy in the company of other people? Why did the original kid suddenly rise in the middle of the night and kill his family, anyway? And why were they as broken up about the death of a woman they ran scams with as they would be about the death of a real mother, when they all disliked each other enough to immediately plot to kill each other? Why did the "father" and "daughter" suddenly decide to kill the other "daughter" then, as soon as the "mother" died?
I give it credit for sheer chutzpah, though. I mean, there's plot twists, and there's breaking the plot's neck entirely. I've never seen anything quite like this one.
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