Horror Story Review

One Line Review: Chilled story, repetitive thrills and refrained performance fails to get the goosebumps on the audience.

Positive points: Horrendous hotel location, Spine-chilling climax.

Negative points: Average character performances, Deafening background score, Repetitive story-line.

Plot: Seven college friends, Achint (Nishant Malkani), Samrat (Hasan Zaidi), Maghesh (Ravish Desai), Sonia (Nandini Vaid), Maggie (Aparna Bajpai) and Neena (Radhika Menon) team up to farewell Neel (Karan Kundra) at a haunted, Hotel Grandiouse, which have been sealed for years. The hotel holds the history of being the mental haven.

Out of a discussion these friends end up giving dare to each other, to spend an unnerving night at the spooky place, where they are destined to experience the devilish trauma, leaving the group of fervent friends have to survive in front of mighty evil powers.

Direction and other technical aspects: A debutant director Ayush Raina proves weak, while delivering average direction to 'Horror Story' for the screenplay written by Vikram Bhatt, who had earlier treated the audience with his excellent spooky genre films. The film contains a chilled out direction, which wouldn't appeal much to the hardcore horror films admirer. The scenes conferred were sliced from earlier eerie flicks. With some outdated thrills, that were cut-folded and presented in the film, like those doors wobbling unnecessarily, wheel chairs moving without anyone's support, suddenly hand kept on one's shoulder and many more to be listed, are the repetitive ones. Wish the director would have come up with some new tactics to terror his audience. In fact, the ghost of the movie resembled a lot to the demon of recent Hollywood release.

Mild cinematography presented is unessential in a horror genre. Where the camera movements needed to be rampant, it was sleek there, which failed to threaten the audience. Mediocre editing was done by Kuldip Mehan. The location of ghostly Hotel looks realistic, which add-ons to build in the mysterious atmosphere.

Performances: 'Horror Story' marked the debut of seven newbies. But apart from Karan Kundra, the other debutantes appears raw. Although, Nishant Malkani, Ravish Desai and Nandini Vaid tried to do justice to their roles, but others have completely failed to convey.

Music: Being wholly a horror genre film, the story-line didn't support songs to creep in. Though horrendous movies require alarming sounds, but the presence of background score in 'Horror Story' proves to be ear-splitting.

Final Verdict: 'Horror Story' didn't stand to the potential expected from of Vikram Bhatt's earlier horror hits 'Raaz', '1920' and 'Haunted'. It's an average film, rekindled from earlier films, with nothing new to give.