#10 House of the Devil

AGAIN: SPOILERS

I gotta say, and I don't think I'm alone on this, this movie didn't really impress me that much. Stylistically it is great, and I love homage to the great horror flicks of the 70s and 80s as much as the next guy. AND I'm a fan of strong, smart female leads... but even with all that, something has to HAPPEN in order for a movie to be interesting. If you're going to pay tribute to genre horror, you kind of need to try and add something to it, not just copy and paste.

It just seems like Ti West, in an early directorial effort, didn't capture the thing that made all of those horror movies that he was paying tribute to work. It was the slow building of suspense. I wasn't really very worried about ol' what's her name in this flick. I'm glad that there was never a moment when I thought that she made a decision that was totally stupid and would eventually lead to her demise, but those decisions are also the plot devices in most horror movies that lead to the good shit. This movie just didn't ever get to that, the good shit. Mostly it was just a bunch of sequences of characters quietly moving from scene to scene and being in the 80s. 'Oh, I'm alone in the house, here's my walkman (again).' 'Better call for pizza, check out this rotary phone.'

Not for nothin', but if you're going to call your movie House of the Devil, I kind of want to see some devil. You know, have him dancing around in the living room or answer the door all pitch fork-y and the whatnot. Instead, we get an old guy, an old woman, and the chunky guy from all these movies as the villains, and they don't even stand a chance against the girl that they lure into the house... of the devil. She basically whips all their asses, no problem.

Oh, I guess there is one part where a weird old lady (?) creature (?) draws a picture of a pentagram on ol' what's her name's belly, thus impregnating her... with the devil. I kind of almost forgot about that part because I was thinking about something scary. Something else, besides this movie.

Oh, and one last thing: this movie cost a million dollars? A million freaking dollars!? Any movie that costs more than sixty thousand better at least deliver a car chase. Or an explosion. Or, I don't know, maybe, the devil?! In this day and age? Really? A Million dollars? That's what you get for shooting on film, bro? Hope you're happy with how 'authentic' your movie looks, because you sacrificed all of your 'doing something awesome' budget on 'making those girl's hair look like hair looked 30 years ago' and getting the rights to that song. You know, that one song, that one that'll make everybody say, "Oh, yeah, that song is from the 80s" when they should be saying, "Holy Lord! Look at that amazing three hundred thousand dollar, fully animated, life size puppet of the devil voiced by Alan Rickman!"

Oh, man... I need to calm down.