Director: Ti West
Starring: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Greta Gerwig
Reviewed by Mike Milling
I bloody LOVE 80′s horror movies. The bad hair, the terrible fist-clenching power-pop, the strange unattractiveness of the apparently attractive girls (this is often down to the bad hair) and the overly home-made looking blood & guts. So when I stumbled across 80′s ‘babysitter in peril’ shocker ‘The House of the Devil’, I was rather pleased.
“Wow! There’s Dee Wallace from ‘The Howling’! And listen to that pumping 80′s electro soft-rock soundtrack! Aces (or whatever they said in the 1980′s)! How did I never catch this cinematic gem during my wasted childhood?”
Oh…I know why. It was made last year. This isn’t a horror classic from the 1980′s at all. It’s just set in the 80′s…and made to look like it was made in the 80′s. You may see this as just a flimsy gimmick (a small bunch of promo copies came out on VHS on it’s release – the first time a film has since ‘A History of Violence’ in 2005 – bit of pointless Trivia for you there), but it is done really bloody well. It REALLY looks and sounds like it was made in the 80′s. So, I’m afraid I instantly fell in love with this film right at the beginning, before anything even happened.
To be fair, nothing actually really ACTUALLY happens (graphic horror-wise) until about 60 – 70 minutes in – though the film is just over 90 minutes long – YOU DO THE MATH(s)! And yeah, this seemed to prove a problem for some people (of the few people who saw it). But not for me.
It’s all about suspense you see. Real, slow-burning, tense, nerve-shredding suspense. No-one seems to make good suspenseful horror any more. It’s all about quick-fixes, slick FX and tiresome comedy zombies these days. And when it is supposed to be ‘edge of the seat’, you are usually on the edge of your seat staring at some emotionless automaton from ‘One Tree Hill’ or some other cheap ‘Dawson’s Creek’ knock-off you see 5 times a day on E4, getting chased in bad 3D by some tit in a mask, who isn’t doing half as good a job as the original tit in a mask from the original film this unoriginal dross you are drowning your eyes with is a remake of! And the only reason you’re on the edge of your seat is because you are ever so eager to escape from the cinema and jump in front of a bus.
This film is different from the usual glossy, polished, hot hog-shit that passes for a modern horror movie. This film is actually scary. It is simple (girl takes a strange babysitting job during a full lunar eclipse, in a big old house in the middle of nowhere, and realises her rather odd clients hide a terrifying and deadly secret) and marvellously executed (the film even looks grainy and VHS-like) by it’s writer and director Ti West (‘Cabin Fever 2′, killer-bat fright-fest ‘The Roost’ – I know, I ain’t heard of it either).
The cast are rather good too. American TV actress Jocelin Donahue does the ‘college student in distress’ impressively enough, Tom Noonan (you may know him best as the axe-happy ‘Ripper’ from Schwarzenegger crap-fest ‘Last Action Hero’ or as child-drugging ‘RoboCop 2′ villain ‘Cain’ – although, I will always fondly remember him as ‘Frankenstein’ from the almighty ‘Monster Squad’) gives a calm and creepy performance as the mysterious ‘Mr. Ullman’, and ‘new Chloë Sevigny’ Greta Gerwig (star of the wonderful ‘Greenberg’ and a fair few hip ‘Mumble-Core’ movies) who is…well…in it. She doesn’t do much, but she is in it so, that’s cool – She is sssoooooo hot right now. Plus, It adds a little bit of indie gravitas to proceedings and reminds us that we do really need a ‘new Chloë Sevigny’, seeing as the original one is old, tired, used, rancid, and diseased. Someone please take her out back and shoot her in the face. It’s for the best.
So yes, you may find this film dull and uneventful. You may think the big pay-off at the end is handled too quickly, and not big enough to satisfy your relentless blood-lust. I fear this may be one for true horror and 80′s movie geeks to fully enjoy and embrace, and could quite possibly alienate anyone who doesn’t quite get what ‘horror-maestro-in-the-making’ Ti West is trying to do (rather like how Tarantino’s brilliant Grind-house homage ‘Death-Proof’ left main-stream ‘non-fanboy’ audiences deflated and unimpressed). It’s one for the geeks – the horrible, disgusting geeks. Like me…and possibly you.
I would also like to mention that, even though this film is in no way the scariest horror flick ever made, after staying up late and watching it all on my own, I went to bed and experienced the most horrific nightmare I have ever witnessed inside my murky mind-tank, in which I watched and happily took part in the violent and gruesome slaughter of my friends and family. It was awful and incredibly disturbing. In fact, just thinking about it is making me physically sick.
My friends and family don’t deserve to be horrifically slaughtered, you see. But Chloë Sevigny definitely does…Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. I take that back. But someone, please, anyone, just give her a bath…and a good slap.
