"Girl House" (2015)

Watched "Girl House" (2015), a movie that was described to me as "'Halloween' meets internet porn", which is a good analogy as it borrows quite a bit from "Halloween"...just not the John Carpenter version. The film opens with a graphic murder of a young girl by the film's killer when he was a child, that comes off very reminiscent of Rob Zombie's "Halloween" (2007). Then it flash forwards to the present, where the plot set up is quite similar to that of "Halloween: Resurrection" (2002), but only here it's at a secluded mansion where members can watch porn stars living there 24 hours a day via webcams. Naturally, the killer in the film is set off by something one of the women does, dons a freaky mask (that reminded me of the "Pretty Woman" mask that Leatherface wore) and then sets out to stalk and kill everyone he can get his hands on in the mansion (all while being broadcasted of course). For me, this is where the film begins to feel like Zombie's "Halloween" again (and I don't mean that in a negative way, as unlike most people I've grown fond of that film over the years), since the killer's methods are quite brutal and the violence feels much more realistic than your average 1980's slasher film. In fact, I did like how the killer would full on bum rush his victims, thus not giving them time to react - something you don't see often in a slasher film. All in all, I would say it's an extremely tense thriller and one of the better slasher offerings to come out in recent years. The only real negative I could apply to it is whether or not the film is trying to say that pornography leads to sexual violence (the film opens with a Ted Bundy quote where he admitted that's what helped set him off). If it is, then it fails to convey that message considering that pornography played no part in the killer's first murder as a child in the beginning (and everything with him stems from that one incident). 8 out of 10 for me.