House of Dust (2014)

Done and Dusted
House of Dust, 2014

One way you can know this is a terrible movie is that when you Google “House of Dust,” you get a bunch of links for vacuum cleaners and allergies and have to look pretty hard for the movie. And when you click on, say, Rotten Tomatoes for this lowish budget horror movie, there are literally no reviews to be found.

This is a bad, bad movie.

But! But filming took place at the Mansfield Training School and Hospital, University of Connecticut, and Eastern Connecticut State University. So I suffered through it. (Though, full disclosure, I became distracted towards the end – and when I say distracted, I mean I folded laundry, picked a hangnail, checked my phone a dozen times… that sort of thing. Anything was better than the movie.)

The director and editors made one excellent decision: It’s only 88 minutes long. Well done.

Speaking of the director, he made the bold move to review his own movie on imdb. Don’t believe me? Here:

Beautifully shot ghost story full of spooky moon lit scenes of northeast Connecticut. Recognizing scenes of the wonderful campus of Eastern Connecticut State University is a special treat for Willimantic area fans. Inspired by a real story of cremation remains of patients found at an abandoned asylum for the “mentally insane” this fantasy often gets too close to reality for comfort. A.D. Calvo has a knack for contrasting beauty and horror, both through images and sounds. This is not a movie to watch alone. In the end, the boundaries of mental health and sanity blur as fantasy and reality trade places. As always, questions are answered as new questions remain.

That person has reviewed three movies in 12 years. All three were A.D. Calvo movies. But hey, thanks to that reviewer, I just added a few more movies filmed in Connecticut by A.D. Calvo. Yeah, Thanks a lot.

The movie opens in a mental health hospital with a sadistic doctor drilling a patient’s head. Like, wildly drilling into his head. This was supposed to be treatment at the Mansfield Training School and Hospital back in the day. Some exterior and establishing shots were filmed on location – The Mansfield Training School and Hospital was a state-run facility for the mentally ill; active from 1860 to 1993. The movie tells us it is “inspired by true events.” Gah.

By the way, the hospital opened elsewhere in 1860 as the Connecticut School for Imbeciles at Lakeville. Its name was changed to the Connecticut Training School for the Feebleminded at Lakeville in 1915. Two years later, it merged with the Connecticut Colony for Epileptics (founded at Mansfield in 1910) and acquired its present name. The buildings fell into disrepair in the 1990’s and 2000’s, but have been rehabbed and revived as part of UConn’s Depot Campus today. Back to the dumb movie.

The psychotic criminal forced to watch the drilling escapes his ties and drills the mean doctor to death. Then he and the drilled patient and I guess someone else all get incinerated in the crematorium. End scene.

Present day college students are beginning a semester and then the new girl Emma arrives and she’s really hot and is roomies with Gabby, friend to the two male leads. Emma is mentally ill, but tries to hide it. The other three are generally idiots. They go to “the biggest party before classes start” which is 12 people around a fire and a case of beer.

They are told not to go into the abandoned old asylum. So they immediately go into the abandoned old asylum. Sigh.

Gabby and the two idiot guys, Colt and Dylan, poke around and wind up inhaling the ash of the guys we saw incinerated at the beginning. Emma was not with them and remains ash-spirit free. Each of the three later “become” the people they “inhaled” – Colt is the psycho serial killer, Dylan becomes an OCD-afflicted clean freak, and Gabby… I forget. Something. Oh, Colt is apparently spelled Kolt. Sorry.

Kolt has a thing for Emma and they kiss, but then he turns evil and starts drinking excessively and becoming sexually aggressive towards other girls. There’s a lot of laundry being done here. In one scene, Evil Kolt fondles and yes, sniffs, a girl named Allison’s panties in a dorm room while three girls are, like, right there but no one bats an eyelash at this. Later, Evil Kolt murders Allison while she’s doing laundry. Emma does some laundry too at some point to find evidence of dead Allison.

I probably should have done laundry more often than I did in college now that I think about it. I was pretty gross.

Fast-forward.

Emma sorts it out and finds the medical records of the burned up guys and finds the ash jars of their remains and figures the whole thing out and is almost killed by Evil Kolt herself but rescues everyone (except the women Evil Kolt killed). In fact, when Emma rescues Kolt and Gabby from the incinerator, you can see the evil ash spirits leave their bodies and all is well. (Well, except for the murdered people that will need to be accounted for.)

The movie ends with the evil ash spirit going into some random kid playing Ring Around the Rosie and this is supposed to jazz us up for a sequel? I hope not. I can’t imagine.

This movie is terrible. It was filmed at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic and if you went there or go there, I guess it’s exciting to see some dorms and academic buildings in a direct-to-DVD movie.

Appropriately, only one library in the state carries this dreck – Mansfield! Interlibrary Loan for the win again!

Do not watch this movie.

CTMQ Rating: 0 out of 5 thumbs up
Connecticutness: 166 out of 169 Nutmegs
Filmed in Connecticut? Yes
Wealthy Caucasian with a Big House? No

Connecticut Movies
Connecticut Horror Movies