User Reviews

This title begins with what would have to be a very short man attempting to hang himself from chin up bar within a door frame with twine. After it breaks 8 times under the weight, he leaves and purchases a sturdy rope only to die from a severe panic attack moments later. The movies goes down hill from there.

We see many shots of trees and fields which pan over a minute to nothing really. I thought I was watching a nature documentary at times. It uses the contrivance of the animal mask. I cannot fathom how this is supposed to inflict fear, personally I think people just look silly. The predominantly utilized mask is a rabbit mask. SCARY!!!!!!

The sound track sets a NEW low in that in certain scenes it is virtually ONE key being pressed on a keyboard. Talk about minimalism! After a few minutes, one will experience brain matter and cranial fluid leaking from their nose.

The main character has a uni-brow so I think there is a sub plot about him suffering from lycanthropy. He and the individual he attempts to get the movie from wear knit hats most of the film but it is not cold.

In the end he becomes a lamb and woman remove a huge pair oxen testicle from his abdomen.

Fortunately the person which receives the tape and promptly watches it, sees the directors cut of the movie which has been edited to 38 seconds and is somewhat viewable. "Old Faithful" proceeds to spout every hour on the hour again!

The House on Cuckoo Lane is a sporadically engaging film one wants dearly to like, but which disappoints because it breaks a promise to fulfill a most exciting premise - a depressed obsessive ruins his life searching for an elusive horror film, purported to show actual on-screen killings. The main problems are two-fold: you can't hear the actors speak their dialogue, as they rush and mumble in their thick Gaelic accents; plus, the plot goes absolutely nowhere and wastes its significant potential in meandering set pieces which ultimately mean little. Also, the film confuses its main subject - snuff film - for something else. Films depicting animal mutilation, political executions, generalized brutality, or random killings constitute either torture porn or atrocity film, whereas the traditional snuff film depicted specifically the act of killing someone on-camera either during, or immediately following, the sex act. On the plus side, the film gets points for depicting fairly accurately and amusingly the lifestyle and mindset of the obsessive video collector, the prejudices and preferences shared by fellow losers, their hilarious rumination on tedious variants of sought-after product (foreign language, different versions, packaging anomalies, etc.) Cuckoo Lane borrows from several sources, the two most obvious being Last House on Dead End Street and Videodrome. From the first, the title itself is reminiscent of its mentor, as well as that film's alternate release title, The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell. However, Roger Watkin's shocking strip of celluloid misanthropy is a bonafide piece of outlaw cinema, repulsive and angry and inchoate and thoroughly insulting to its audience. Also from Last House comes one of Cuckoo Lane's rare visual peaks: killers wearing animal masks. From Videodrome comes the notion of fetish video, plus the idea of a cursed film manipulating the life of its target viewer, plus the notion of certain film's ability to either invoke or exacerbate hallucinations. Yet none of these promising angles is ever developed, and the film just sort of sits there, depressed along with its protagonist, until his mental illness gets the better of him, and/or this cursed video nasty actually absorbs and neutralizes it's latest victim. And perhaps the worst crime is the main jerk's girlfriend, an integral and interesting character who is completely thrown away. The delicious irony of this failed yet intriguing film is that the protagonist is played by the film's writer-producer-director - so the creator and his fictional creation have both bitten off more than they could chew. This fascinating, if dark subject deserves a better treatment than this: a full-out reboot of Last House on Dead End Street is really called for, but the world will never be ready for that.