‘The House of the Devil’

Low-rent 1980s horror returns with filmmaker Ti West’s “The House of the Devil,” which scores points for restraint and attention to detail but defaults when the mortgage comes due with a bloody, pointless, uninspired climax.

Writer-director West offers a prolonged buildup as college sophomore Sam (Jocelin Donahue) finds the perfect apartment she can’t afford with a maternal landlady (Dee Wallace), then stumbles onto a campus flier for a baby-sitting gig offered by the Ulmans (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov), a weird, suspiciously desperate couple who live in the middle of nowhere.

Sam’s pal Megan (Greta Gerwig) tells her to blow them off, and the whole thing is even more foreboding for taking place on the night of a lunar eclipse.

We know from the title, the shots of the eclipse and a few clunky clues West weaves in that the Ulman clan are devil worshippers on a deadline. Satan needs to hire a better staff, though, given how bad these followers are at their jobs.

They outnumber their petite victim and could have overpowered her the moment she walked in the door. Instead, they allow her free run of the house. Sam spends most of the night meandering about, leaving most of “House of the Devil” about as fun as watching a babysitter, well, meander about.

The retro touches are nice throwbacks to the ’80s – feathered hair, a portable cassette player the size of a brick, dirty old pay phones in pre-mobile days, even a rotary-dial phone.

But in the end, it’s little more than a faithful flashback – authentic in execution, but about as scary as something you saw again and again way back when.