“Torture Porn Without the Porn or the Point”
Every once in a while, a horror film comes along that makes you question not only your taste in movies but your basic life choices. House on the Hill is one of those films. It’s a cinematic crime scene masquerading as entertainment—a grim, joyless slog based on the real-life atrocities of serial killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.
Now, a film about Lake and Ng could, in theory, be fascinating. Their crimes were horrifying enough to chill anyone’s blood. But instead of exploring the psychology of evil, director Jeffrey Frentzen serves up a shaky-cam dumpster fire so tasteless it makes Human Centipede look like Downton Abbey.
If this is horror, then it’s horror in the same way food poisoning is “fine dining.”
The Setup: “Based on Real Events,” Which Somehow Makes It Worse
The film opens with a disclaimer about being based on true events, as if to warn the audience that what they’re about to see will be both traumatizing and unwatchable—but not for the reasons intended.
Our protagonist, Sonia (Naidra Dawn Thomson), is introduced as the lone survivor of Leonard Lake’s murder compound. She’s traumatized, yes, but also strangely calm for someone who’s been forced to film torture videos. Then again, maybe she’s just trying to process the fact that she’s stuck in a movie where the dialogue sounds like it was written by an AI trained on ransom notes.
Sonia teams up with a private investigator named Paul, who apparently missed every “Don’t Go in There” lecture ever given in horror film history. Together, they revisit the scene of the crimes to look for a missing woman, because apparently the best way to find closure after surviving hell is to go back and re-open the gates.
As they explore Lake’s bunker of horrors, Sonia recounts her ordeal in flashbacks, which make up most of the runtime—and approximately all of the suffering, both on-screen and off.
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng: The Original True Crime Losers
The killers are played by Stephen A.F. Day (Lake) and Sam Leung (Ng), who give performances that feel like rejected auditions for a low-budget CSI: Sacramento. They’re meant to be sadistic masterminds, but they come off more like two guys who spend too much time arguing on Reddit.
Day’s Lake talks like a serial killer who’s read Nietzsche for Dummies, while Leung’s Ng mostly grunts and looks confused, which, to be fair, is how most of us felt watching this movie.
The film tries to recreate their twisted world of captivity, torture, and videotaped murder, but it does so with all the subtlety of a meat cleaver. Every scene drags on like a confession you didn’t want to hear but can’t turn off.
The Flashbacks: Because Who Doesn’t Love Endless Trauma
If you thought the framing story was bad, buckle up for the flashbacks. These sequences are where the movie truly becomes an endurance test for the human soul.
Sonia, forced by the killers to film their crimes, narrates her memories in a monotone voice that sounds like a GPS system guiding you through Hell: “Turn left at the pit of despair. Your destination is ten screams away.”
We see women being kidnapped, tied up, humiliated, and murdered—all of it filmed with the kind of shaky, overexposed camerawork that suggests the cinematographer was trapped in a washing machine.
Now, exploitation cinema can work when it’s artfully done—think Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. But House on the Hill doesn’t aspire to art. It aspires to be Faces of Death and fails even at that.
Every act of violence feels less like storytelling and more like someone mistaking “trauma porn” for tension. There’s no suspense, no buildup, no purpose—just endless brutality stitched together by editing so lazy it could qualify for disability benefits.
The Private Investigator: A Hero Only in Theory
Meanwhile, back in the present, the private investigator stumbles around the compound like he’s on a true crime sightseeing tour. He exists solely to give Sonia someone to monologue at. Their dialogue scenes are so awkward you start to root for the ghosts of Lake and Ng to show up just to end the conversation.
Paul is supposed to be the audience surrogate—the guy who asks the questions we’re all thinking—but instead he spends most of his time nodding blankly or reacting to Sonia’s trauma stories like someone who’s just been told their Uber is five minutes late.
If empathy were a skill, this man would still be in the tutorial level.
The Violence: Gratuitous, Graphic, and Greatly Pointless
Let’s talk about the violence, since that’s clearly what the filmmakers want to talk about. It’s graphic, sure, but it’s also cheap, exploitative, and emotionally empty.
The gore effects look like something ordered from the “DIY Crime Scene” aisle at Spirit Halloween. Limbs flop around like rubber chickens, and fake blood gushes with the viscosity of expired ketchup. It’s all so poorly staged that it manages to be both repulsive and boring—a rare feat.
At one point, Lake pontificates about morality while torturing a victim, because apparently the film thinks it’s Se7en. But instead of deep philosophical commentary, we get dialogue that sounds like it was scribbled on a napkin during happy hour: “We are all gods, Sonia! Gods of flesh!”
No, Leonard. You’re not a god. You’re a sweaty man in a basement with bad lighting.
The Editing: Or, How to Murder Pacing
The pacing in House on the Hill makes molasses look hyperactive. Scenes drag on forever, looping between Sonia’s flashbacks and the present-day investigation until you start to wonder if time itself has been kidnapped and tortured.
The editing is so disjointed it feels like the movie was put together by someone assembling Ikea furniture without the manual. Characters appear, disappear, and reappear without explanation.
One moment we’re in the bunker; the next, we’re watching Sonia stare into space for 45 seconds like she’s trying to remember if she left the oven on.
The Performances: Less Acting, More Flailing
Naidra Dawn Thomson, as Sonia, gives it her all, but “all” here means “a combination of shell-shocked whispering and spontaneous sobbing.” She’s clearly committed, but there’s only so much you can do when every line of dialogue is just a setup for the next torture montage.
Stephen A.F. Day as Leonard Lake delivers his lines like he’s auditioning for American Psycho: The Dinner Theater Edition. Sam Leung as Ng is even less convincing, alternating between smirking, sweating, and occasionally stabbing people like he’s checking tasks off a grocery list.
Everyone else exists solely to scream, cry, or die badly.
The Ending: Thank God It Ends
By the time the movie limps to its conclusion, you’re not so much watching as enduring. The story ends exactly where it began—with Sonia traumatized, justice nowhere to be found, and the audience wondering what crimes we committed to deserve this runtime.
Even the credits feel like an apology note written under duress.
The Censorship: 7 Minutes Cut, 90 More Needed
In the UK, seven minutes of content were removed to secure an 18 rating. Honestly, the British Board of Film Classification should’ve been bolder and cut the entire film. If anything, those seven minutes were probably the only chance it had to make sense.
Final Verdict
House on the Hill is the cinematic equivalent of staring into a dirty toilet bowl while someone whispers, “It’s art.”
It’s exploitative without insight, violent without tension, and depressing without depth. It fails as a thriller, as a horror film, and as a coherent piece of storytelling.
If you ever find yourself tempted to watch it, just stare at a wall for 90 minutes while someone plays static noise in the background—it’ll be scarier, cheaper, and far less traumatic.
Rating: 1 out of 5 decapitated brain cells.
The real horror here isn’t the violence—it’s realizing you’ll never get those 90 minutes of your life back.
