11th Hour Cleaning – Film Review

A team of crime scene cleaners experiences ghastly hallucinations and must confront their most personal regrets and fears when they are trapped at a recent murder site by an ancient Nordic demon hell-bent on driving them insane.

As soon as I clicked play on Ty Leisher‘s 11th Hour Cleaning, I became instantly scared that I was about to watch the worst movie of the year. The reason why? It had a production company logo appear called “Chicken Soup for the Soul Productions.” Wait, what? For those who are unfamiliar, Chicken Soup for the Soul is a massively popular series of self-help books that one of your middle school teachers probably read to you one day. If you don’t remember, they probably did. Trust me.

So, my natural question was “Why on Earth is the company behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul books making a horror movie?”. It was bugging me. I was praying that the film wouldn’t be abysmally bad, and while I can report that it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be, it’s still not any good. While I do respect and admire director Ty Leisher and company for trying their best, they ultimately ended up crafting a movie that says a whole lot of nothing.

Leisher’s direction here is actually quite strong, though. The atmosphere here is shockingly incredible, and the cinematography by Vince Taroc will occasionally make you feel a little bit claustrophobic. The lighting showcases that something is not quite what it seems in this story. Honestly, for the first twenty minutes of the film, I was prepared to say that I actually enjoyed it, but then it divulges into silly territory.

All of the horror-centric elements are straight-up lame and lack any sort of originality whatsoever. Not to mention the fact that there are barely any truly “creepy” scenes in the entire film. Obviously, seasoned horror buffs aren’t going to find this film even remotely unnerving, but unfortunately, this also wouldn’t scare somebody who has never seen a horror movie before in their life.

The script from Leisher and Ed Morrone is all over the place. It seemed as if one of the two wanted to make this more of a drama whereas the other wanted to make it a full-blown horror film, and the tonal clash and overall messiness of the script is jarring. Not to mention the fact that a large portion of the dialogue here is cringe-worthy. It’s a shame though, because quite a few of the lead performances are good, particularly from Anita Leeman Torres, Chloe Brooks, Edward Finlay, and Dave Baez.

11th Hour Cleaning is a respectable horror outing with some good performances and direction, but the incredibly sloppy script and confused tone bog this film down completely.