Stay Out of The Attic (2020) - Movie Review
What do you get when a group of people watch a double feature of American History X and Frankenstein’s Army and decide that they can do a low-budget mash-up during COVID lockdowns?
A real piece of shit, that’s what.
Let’s discuss.
Stay Out of the Attic (Stay Out of the Fucking Attic) is a 2020 horror film brought to us by writer / director Jerren Lauder and writers Jason Scott Goldberg and Jesse Federman. Does anyone remember what our rule is when we see more than 2 writers on a film?
Run for the hills!
This film is an atrocity that has nothing good to offer. It has a lazy, mindless script that sounds like it was written by AI. None of the characters sound real. They sound like the idea rich white people have of how lower class folks talk. All of the characters are unlikable. The lead is basically a board of wood balanced upright on screen. This is a painful slog of a film that feels like a 5 year old’s idea of edgy.
The film focuses on a moving crew operated by Albert and his employees Imani and Carlos as they go through a normal moving day. They’re called to a strange old mansion by an old German doctor who has strict requirements. If they can completely pack up the house by dawn, they’ll get four times their standard rate plus a thousand dollar bonus, but that’s only if they stay out of the attic. As they pack the house, they find that not all is as it seems and the good doctor is anything but. Will they be able to escape the house of horrors, or will they find themselves dragged into the attic?
I think I made it it sound way more compelling than it actually is. This movie is a dumpster fire of bad special effects, poor musical score, and atrocious writing. The acting and directing is a meandering mess as well. This film is a charisma sink. An 80 minute film shouldn’t feel 3 hours long—but this one did.
The terrible musical score really gets the low-point award as it shifts from out of place Vaporwave at the beginning of the film to cringey fake rap-music, and then to public domain songs near the end. To top that, the music, sound effects, and dialogue are so badly mixed that you have to turn on subtitles if you actually want to understand what’s going on. The sound balance is completely different scene to scene. It’s an audio catastrophe.
I hate shitting on movies like this, but this movie should have never made it to streaming.
This is a bad student film at best.
If you do want to see this mess, check it out streaming exclusively on Shudder.
