As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

A guy is picknicking with his girlfriend when he has a vision of being in the middle of a ritual with a book, pentagrams, candles, and his naked girlfriend attacks him with a knife. He gets the upper hand and kills her. Then he wakes up right before surgery. They are going to operate on his brain. He tries to resists but gives in. He wakes up in the recovery room. The Dr. tells him years have passed and he's going to transfer him to The House Of Love to complete his recovery. There he meets some more patients- a guy who talks through a handpuppet, a slutty girl, a friendly guy who sometimes is too friendly. But our guy keeps having visions and starts getting suspicious about the House of Love. The Dr. in the meantime watches everything that happens there in a room full of screens and has invited another Dr. to watch and to discuss the case. They discuss implants...and the book.Our hero discovers in the attic a chest, that is somehow connected to him. And inside he finds a passage to a basement that looks like the scene of the ritual. And he finds the book. He also thinks that he is being manipulated and that everyone is part of some elaborate hoax. He keeps having visions of the girlfriend. The friendly guy goes nuts and starts killing people. While the guy continues to search for answers.The Attic Expedition is a confusing movie that doesn't explain itself or give an answer. One can read here on IMDb a variety of interpretations that all sounds plausible. It's also a very low budget movie that occasionally looks pretty good. It's not much of a horror movie more of a mystery thriller. Unfortunately, for it to work it would have to have been more involving or interesting. Since it isn't I didn't care to look for hints or try to figure it all out. And when the story doesn't want to reveal itself either, what's the point? I guess there wasn't a solid story to begin with, just scenes, and lines that our minds are then inclined to try to put together. The set of the House of Love is unfortunately distractingly cheap, perhaps on purpose? But a lot is made about how this movie was done with barely a budget. So one doesn't even know if the shortcomings are just a matter of the story or of necessity. If you like a puzzle then perhaps this is something that might interest you.

This is a movie that really makes you wonder about the casting process. Not that it doesn't have quite a few other flaws, but it's obvious that it could have been a lot better if they had just switched some of the actors around.Trevor Blackburn (Andras Jones) is a man who doesn't know what's real and what isn't. He remembers having a picnic with Faith (Beth Bates), the woman he loves. But he also remembers her trying to kill him in some sort of magical ceremony. He wakes up from a coma in a private sanitarium, only to be told by Dr. Ek (Jeffrey Combs) that he killed Faith and was in that coma for 4 years. But he also seems to remember Dr. Ek performing some kind of brain surgery on him. Trevor gets sent to the House of Love, sort of a halfway house for the mentally disturbed, where he starts having dreams about a trunk in the attic with a spiral staircase inside it. That's when we find out that Dr. Ek has cameras throughout the House of Love and everyone else there besides Trevor is an actor playing a role. Dr. Ek is looking for a mysterious book, the same book Faith was using in that magical ceremony. Oh, and it turns out that while Faith is dead, that hasn't crimped her style as much as you might expect.This is one of those movies where reality is more of a multiple choice thing. Is the House of Love real? Is Trevor actually an outpatient with a head of hair or is he a bald, muttering nutjob still wearing a straight jacket? Is the stuff that happens up in the attic real, is it all in Trevor's mind or is there something supernatural going on? Is Dr. Ek really running an elaborate experiment on Trevor because he's desperate to get a magical book, or is it all just a dream taking place during brain surgery? You can never be sure because the movie is never sure. It reverses itself and contradicts itself and sometimes just makes no sense at all. The filmmakers could have taken a lot of the scenes in this movie, switched them around, and it wouldn't really have made much difference.For all that, it is a rather engaging story until you figure out it doesn't make any sense. There are a few good scares and some decent female nudity and it's not very self-important, so the bad stuff in it is more silly and campy than insultingly stupid.What really lets the film down, however, is very poor casting. Jeffrey Combs is melodramatic but perfectly fine and the evil Dr. Ek. Seth Green, playing another mental patient/actor, doesn't quite have the chops to create a real character but has enough personality to keep from really sucking. Ted Raimi turns in a professional performance as a doctor who comes to question Ek's methods. Beth Bates even does a credible job as Faith, which is saying something given that she spends just as much time naked as she does clothed. But the main character in the movie is Trevor, played by Andras Jones. Putting it as gently as possible, Andras Jones is a brick. He can say the lines, but that's about as far as his "acting" seems to extend. His struggle with sanity and reality is at the heart of the film but you can't feel anything from his performance, which is flatter than a pancake after it's been run over by a tank.I'm not sure how good this movie could have ever been, but if they'd just switched the actors around it could have been a lot better. If Combs or Green had been playing the main character, it's so obvious they would have brought a lot more to the story. Considering they're both also more famous than Andras Jones, it doesn't make any sense to place them in supporting roles and let a movie live or die on the back of a guy who no one has heard of and doesn't appear to be able to actually act. Heck, Alice Cooper has a bit part in the film and even he'd probably do a better job and be a better choice for the main character.There's enough in The Attic Expeditions that you can see how the filmmakers and the actors thought this might be a worthwhile story to tell. But the casting director screwed them and the audience out of whatever that story might have been.

~Spoiler~The Attic Expeditions was a fun and very cool movie when I first viewed it in 2001. Apparently my tastes have changed. Revisiting it in 2008 I'm having difficulty reasoning why I own this film. The film follows Trevor (Andras Jones from Nightmare on Elm Street 4) as he is recovering from brain surgery in an insane asylum. Trevor's evil Dr. is running an experiment on him to find an occult book that Trevor may or may not be in possession of. There are many Lovecraft nods that horror geeks will pick up on; the book is obviously meant to be the Necronomicon. The Attic Expeditions is your typical "head screw" story where you're never sure what is reality or what is not. And that's the problem. I'm sick of these movies. I find the majority of them tedious and nigh incomprehensible. The photography is fantastic and the actors are all commendable, though Jones is a bit wooden. Jeffrey Combs is always good at the evil doctor role, Ted Raimi is a great ham, and Seth Green seems a little out of place. Alice Cooper has a small cameo. I thought director Jeremy Kasten was going to be a name to watch for. Unfortunately I was majorly disappointed with his second feature, All Soul's Day, and did not bother watching his third, The Thirst.

I think anyone who watches this movie and thinks that it was incoherent, or had no plot may not have understood the movie. I watched it 3 times before I finally felt like I got it kinda, and I still leave room that I could be completely off base. The way I see it there are three tales unfolding. What happened before he was placed in the mental hospital, what is taking place in the hospital and inside his mind. I am still torn about what is taking place in his mind, the house of love or the mental hospital with the deranged doctor/scientist. I am assuming it is the house of love as none of those characters ever come into play unless he is around. We know he killed his girlfriend, some sort of ritual gone wrong. So his girlfriend is left in limbo. She gets into his mind somehow and is able to "possess" the characters at the house of love (hence Douglas wanting a kiss, almost stealing a kiss on the porch swing, and the girls voice at the end). I will definitely watch this a 4th, 5th, 6th time, until I do fully understand. This is a movie, it just may go over the heads of some.