Welcome to the month of October. The month of Horror.
To celebrate Live for Film is having a horror movie review each night in the 31 Days of Horror. You can see last years 31 days here. You can be involved by sending me your review of a horror film – new, old, good, bad, depressing, funny, disgusting, psychological. As long as it can be classed as a horror then you can send it over to me atphil@liveforfilms.com
Click here to see all the reviews for 2011′s 31 Days of Horror.
Today Mike Spring of the excellent DVD Snapshot reviews The Perfect Host.
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is nothing at all like you expect and completely blows you out of the water. It sounds like hyperbole, but we’ve all had that reaction at one point or another. And — without a doubt — that happened to me with The Perfect Host.
Warwick Wilson is the consummate host. He carefully prepares for a dinner party, the table impeccably set and the duck perfectly timed for 8:30 p.m. John Taylor is a career criminal. He’s just robbed a bank and needs to get off the streets. He finds himself on Warwick’s doorstep posing as a friend of a friend, new to Los Angeles, who’s been mugged and lost his luggage. As the wine flows and the evening progresses, we become deeply intertwined in the lives of these two men and discover just how deceiving appearances can be. With outstanding performances by David Hyde Pierce and Clayne Crawford, co-writer/director Nick Tomnay takes us on a suspense-filled ride where nothing is as it seems. The Perfect Host is a slippery psychological thriller that exposes true human nature and reveals just how far we’re willing to go to satisfy our needs.
Now, here’s the tough part. This movie is an EXTREMELY tough sell. The main actor in it is David Hyde Pierce, who’s not exactly a box office juggernaut. There’s also the problem that I can’t actually tell you anything about what this movie is about. You see, this is a film that has such a great story, with such great twists, that to say anything about it at all would potentially give away most of what makes it so much fun to watch. Suffice it to say that at its core, it’s the story of a bank robber and a hostage, but that doesn’t even come close to scratching the surface of what this film is about. It’s a psychological thriller of the highest order, and I promise you — I PROMISE you — you will not see this movie coming.
