17 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: Housebound (2014)

Everyone walks out of a movie once in a while.  Maybe because something pulled you away or maybe because you just couldn't sit through it, whatever the reason, we all walk out of a movie at least once.  Of course, the home version of this is, everyone turns off a movie early once in a while.  There are too many excuses to be made for it so I'm not going to bother saddling them here.  The point is that I once tried to watch Gerard Johnstone's Housebound and I turned it off in the first 20 minutes.  I'm not really sure what the hell I was thinking either, because it's a great film.

A troubled young woman, Kylie (Morgana O'Reilly), botches an attempted ATM theft and is remanded to house arrest at her old home for 8 months.  Upon returning home, with shitty attitude intact, she overhears her mother, Miriam (Rima Te Wiata), calling in to a radio station to tell about an experience in the basement that led her to believe the house is haunted.  Kylie dismisses this until she starts to experience strange things as well and after a bit of digging with the help of her paranormal enthusiast probation officer, Amos (Glen-Paul Waru), she discovers that the house was previously a half-way house that a young girl was murdered in 15 years ago, and that her spirit is haunting the house.  How do you get rid of a vengeful spirit?  Help it find it's killer of course.

As I said before, the first time I tried to watch this film I only made it about 20 minutes before I turned it off.  My excuses, though they don't really matter, are only two.  One: I was tired. Two: Kylie is such an unlikable character during the first half of the film that it's hard to watch as a result.  This speaks loads to Morgana O'Reilly's performance because she won me over by the end of the film, with a little bit of a rousing pep talk from her probation officer.  She is so nasty, rude, and god damn awful to everyone around her that it made the decision to go to sleep that much easier.  At the prodding of a friend of who visited recently, I decided to give it another go and try to focus on the more humorous aspects of the film.  This helped tremendously.

The film is really quite funny and maintains a dry sense of wit even in some very serious situations.  All of the characters feel like real people, even when they're slight parodies and the intrigue of the mystery increases with the duration of the film so that when it finally comes to the big climactic ending the audience is left with a thoroughly satisfying conclusion.  It occurred to me that there were probably a lot more clues throughout the earlier half of the film that I completely missed, giving the film the appeal of multiple viewings.  Top notch acting and excellent production quality round out a truly entertaining piece of New Zealand cinema!

The Amityville Horror (1979): 08 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

There are plenty of films about Haunted Houses and each one always seems to draw a little bit from a film before it.  Call it part of our obsession with the inexplicable, or our desire to find proof of some sort of afterlife, even if it may be a hellish purgatory for the spirits.  It's a subject that I haven't seen too many films about and if I'm being honest, it's because I don't believe in ghosts.  It's really that simple.  Still, these movies are fun, in that they give the filmmaker free reign with ways to make a house attack it's inhabitants.  The Amityville Horror takes it's time, but certainly delivers plenty of creepy motives and motifs that helped cement the subject matter within the horror genre.

Based on a "true" story, the film and house itself have drawn the curiosity of casual interest to devotee's of paranormal research and phenomena.  Most people who have even the slightest interest in the story know that it's about George and Kathy Lutz who bought a house at 112 Ocean, 14 months after Ronald DeFeo, Jr killed 6 members of his family within it's confines.  The story goes that within a few days of moving in the family began to experience strange phenomena and claimed that a spirit within the house was terrorizing them.  By the 23rd day they fled the house.

The Lutz family was the subject of many television interviews, books, and critique.  They stand by their belief that it was supernatural, but as the scientific method says, if you can't disprove it, that does not mean it's impossible, merely improbable.  Personally, my money is on stress, hysteria, and good old fashioned denial, but we're not here to discuss fact and fiction, we're here to talk about a film.

Before I get TOO negative (yeah, it's coming) I'd like to say that Margot Kidder and James Brolin (Josh Brolin's father) both deliver convincing performances as Kathy and George Lutz.  You really get the sense that they're being shaken to pieces by the film, although there is one Brolin moment that's almost reminiscent to the infamous "You're tearing me apart Lisa!" line from the awful pile of cinematic shit that is known as The Room, which nearly made me burst out loud with laughter.  Rod Steiger delivers a wonderfully emotional performance as Father Delaney.  It's reported that he was so unnerved and disgusted by a scene in which he had to be surrounded and slightly covered by flies that he found himself unable to eat for some time after and lost 30 pounds.

This film makes use of a gamete of gags to instill fear and suspense in the viewer, via the score, sound design, and visual gags.  A room full of flies, blood leaking out of a wall, explosive lightning, etc.  You name it, they do it, only skipping out on walking corpses.  While some of these gags are great, for the most part it played a little tame for me.  The movie clocks in at about 118 minutes including ending credits and unfortunately that hurts it.  It was cut together more like a diary of the bizarre events that took place rather than building suspense.  Each day where something of import takes place is preceded by a super title: Day <insert number here>.  This merely breaks the story apart when it starts to get juicy.  The climax delivers as one would expect, but is unnecessarily drawn out for no real reason that I could see except to say, "Hey look, blood! Woah why does she look so old! Hey wait, we can't leave the dog behind!"  Pardon the deliberate ambiguity, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone who may decide to watch it anyway following this review.

It's not that the film is bad, it's just not really good either.  It falls in that "meh" category that requires someone to be legitimately interested in, or full blown obsessed with the paranormal.  Me, I prefer the idea's of humans wielding supernatural power upon each other rather than the idea that their spirits would have any cause to linger in the physical plane.  Perhaps I need to see a few more to really make up my mind, but so far The Legend of Hell House is the only film of this sub-genre that I could really enjoy watching again.

2 out of 5 skulls.

The Innkeepers: 01 of 31 Horror Films I Have Never Seen!

Last year I made an attempt at a personal challenge to watch 31 Horror films that I had never seen before.  Due to my work schedule and my personal life being in a state of turmoil I was unable to complete this challenge so this year I’m taking the plunge once again with the intention of completing it come hell or high water.

For film number one, I settled on Ti West’s The Innkeepers.  The film is a loving homage to the Haunted House Ghost Story, while simultaneously being a bit of a critique on the millennial generation.  The main characters, Claire and Luke, are spending the last weekend at work before the Yankee Peddler Inn will close its doors once and for all.  Luke is really more of the supporting character of the story as the central focus is Claire, an early 20s college dropout who has no idea what she wants out of life.  Sara Paxton plays Claire with sort of manic energy that certainly harkens to a younger generation which is contrasted nicely by Pat Healy’s dead pan malaise.

West throws us into the story with very little exposition other than a few remarks that ultimately lead us to our central focus, the search for proof that a spirit is haunting the Inn.  From there the story unfolds in a fashion that was a bit too typical for my tastes.  The film is very well shot, very well lit, very well edited, and even very well scored, but West spends too much time trying to make the world real before getting to the juicy bits. 

Ultimately I found it rather tedious and not nearly as arresting as his previous film, House of the Devil.  I couldn’t relate with Claire and Luke, because I have nothing in common with them.  Overall, I think West, who wrote/directed/edited the film, could have gotten to the actual conflict in the story much faster than he did.  He opted for a slow burn type of story, but the climax fell short.  Still there were a few enjoyable jumpy moments, great make up, and Kelly McGillis was perfectly cast as a retired actor turned spiritual guru.

For all its short comings, I still enjoyed the film more than found footage ghost films like the Paranormal Activity series, a series which needs to die horribly in a fire.  West does a good job setting up the atmosphere, but all the atmosphere in the world doesn’t quite save this film from the “meh” factor.

I gave it 3 out of 5 Skulls.