House of Fears revolves around a group of over excitable teens who decide to pay a visit to the local house of fears, scary attraction building one night. Unknown to them the owner of the building has been on expedition to Africa and has sent back an artifact, an artifact that has the power to make a persons fears become reality. This scenario creates a perfect storm of death and terror as the young group desperately struggle to work out what's going on and find a way to escape.

Well this was a pleasant surprise. I really didn't expect too much from this going into viewing it but a lot of my preconceptions were delightedly vitiated. Firstly, even though the main protagonists in the movie are the usual annoying teenager types, they're performed decently by the cast of relative unknowns and there's some solid depths to the cast of characters, which mainly focuses around two step sisters Samantha (Corri English) and Hailey (Sandra McCoy). There's some real sibling rivalry going on, though the experience they go through in the house really bleeds out a lot of the pent up emotions. The two actresses do this convincingly and the movie is all the better for it. The rest of the cast are good also with nobody letting the story down.

The premise of placing characters in a spooky environment and having them fight for their lives isn't particularly original. However, the fact the house is built around themes, eg: clowns, spiders, ghosts, etc (the things a lot of people have phobias of) and using the African Artifact as an actualizing agent is really quite clever. It definitely makes for one fun movie which is perhaps a bit light on gore for my liking but it's definitely fun.

There is some scares to be found in House of Fears but there's nothing that's going to have seasoned horror aficionado's hiding behind the couch. Perhaps, however, the more casual viewer would be left reeling by some of the delectably nasty monstrosities this movie has to show and there is at least a couple I can think of that do look really quite freaky.

The movie's general production value is great, even though it's clearly a b-movie it does feel a lot of the time like we're watching an a-class movie from one of the big studios.

To conclude i thoroughly recommend House of Fears to any horror fan or anybody looking for a good way to spend time in front of the TV on that lonely night.