Home Movie (2008)

So much average

Nice effects though.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

What have I just watched? I'm not even sure how to rate this movie. In some ways it succeeds brilliantly as a horror film. I won't forget it, that's for sure. But it fails miserably as storytelling because it's as if you are watching the definition of nihilism. The message of this movie is that everything is meaningless and, as such, it's pretty hard to enjoy. Basically the premise is the meeting of three things: religious faith (the father is a Lutheran pastor who believes in demonic possession); scientific rationality (the mother is a child psychiatrist who believes there are no bad children only un-medicated ones) and pure evil (their twin children). The twins, Jack and Emily, are silent and surly and watchful. When this changes to downright evil (you know things are going to go bad when the multitude of family pets is introduced: goldfish, frog, cat, dog) the mother tries to treat them with drugs and the father attempts an exorcism. Well, I guess you would, given they find the family cat crucified on the wall on Christmas Day. And that is where I have my problem with this movie, I guess. I'm sorry, but I don't find it credible that any parents, however sweet and goofy they show themselves to be, would continue living in the same house as these twin f***s when they find that cat. The father even says, "But I still love them. How can I not love my son and my sweet baby girl?" Yeah, like, right... I bet the dog was thinking, "F*** that, I'm gonna be next, Fool!" And he'd have been right. He was. So, continue on together they do; dog bites the dust (nope, even severed head of beloved old pet doesn't make these parents give up on their sweet kids) and the twins inevitably turn their attentions to humans: torturing a young boy at the school. Even then the parents continue making videos to prove what a happy family they are. By the time the kids had them beaten, drugged, strapped to a table, suffocating in plastic, and ready to eat, I was thinking, "Yup, should have taken the goldfish sandwich as a hint all was not well."

The summary above says it all. I really cannot think of any improvements for this movie. It had all the great elements of a horror; suspense, miss-direction, character build-up. To me this was a straight 10/10, I wish there was a home movie 2. Personally I'm not a big fan of the whole video camera way of filming, but this was definitely an exception. The only time that I found the camera a bit hard to believe was when (spoiler) David was tied up and instead of running upstairs in a panic, the first thing she thinks to do is pick up the camera... But apart from that it was quite realistic, for example (spoiler) with the cat on the cross, David turned the camera off straight away (as everyone else would do).At some points in this movie I was seriously creeped out, even at small things, like when they're at the dinner table and the camera skips/flashed. Okay I'm going into way too much details, but this movie is outstanding for a movie I had never heard of until a day ago, it is even short so if it isn't for you, not much time was wasted. But in any case, give it a shot!

The positive reviews for this turd are clearly written by shills. The acting is abominable. The characterizations are incredibly inconsistent and not the least bit real. I laughed out loud when the dad showed up in a priest's collar! WTF?!?! This douchey moron who farts through the whole movie and treats his kids like crap is a man of the cloth?? And I'd love to get an actual count of the number of fart jokes they use. FART JOKES!!! What??!!?! And the mom is DOCTOR mom, child psychiatrist, but she had the most ludicrously f-ed up kids on earth and doesn't do anything about it until they're actually trying to kill HER. And there's NO STORY. It's just random, meaningless clips strung together and then the kids gradually do weirder (albeit a totally contrived type of 'weird') things. But the kids don't go from normal, happy kids to supernatural freaks. They go from weirdos to violent weirdos. It's pitiful. It's like a closet-gay jock with a drinking problem made this movie. And the "found footage" aspect is pointless, because they don't stick to the "rules" of found footage. What a relentless waste of time.

Released at the beginning of the Second Found Footage Wave (my own moniker), Home Movie is just that - a found footage film. But unlike something like Cloverfield, Home Movie is a very, very small film that centers around a family in upstate New York. The family, the father (a priest - played by Adrian Pasdar or, as I know him, Caleb from Near Dark) the mother (a psychiatrist), and two kids, have moved to the rural countryside in order to ease the children's declining mental states.I don't know how much of a spoiler it is to say that this is a killer kid film, as you can probably gather that by looking at the back of the box. And, let's be honest, who doesn't love killer kid films? From the Bad Seed to Who Can Kill a Child? to The Good Son, killer kid flicks are just great. Mine is still just shy of three months old, so I don't have to worry too much about him, but I wonder if I'll still feel this way when he gets a little older...old enough to wield, say, a hammer? Anyway, so the two little freakish kids wind up being just a little bit more malevolent than the parents ever thought. That's all well and good, but my absolute favorite part of the film is the filmmaker's propensity to wrap everything up very nicely. At the end of the film (LAST WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD) when the kids finally best old' mom and pop, they put to use every bit of advice that the dad had given them in attempts to "normalize" them. Here is a list of things that I picked up on that were originally taught to the kids by the parents, and then turned around on them to be used for their demise:Trash bags for dead things. The dragon/paper mask story. The picking of the locks. The tying of the knots. The ability of the pills to induce comas. The use of a baseball bat. Overall, it's an interesting film. That's not to say it's fantastic or anything. The acting is pretty flat, at times it's not lean enough to keep you from wanting to hit fast-forward, and sometimes the camera work can get on your nerves. It's definitely not the best found-footage movie (I'd give that title to Spain's rec), but it is an entertaining, and deeply interesting piece that works, for the most part, on all the levels that it attempts to. It's definitely recommended viewing and a nice find in the onslaught of crappy horror that's produced today.