House Hunting aka The Wrong House (2013)I've been a bit burned out from watching movies lately - got a ton of zombie ones to cover (hard to do during TWD season) and a lot of foreign movies (I need my full attention and brain power to concentrate on them) so I've been dinking around with cartoons and movies so bad I wouldn't even put them here.
I found this one by pure accident - it wasn't on the horror list, I was just looking for something to keep half an eye on while playing my games and I found this thriller with Marc Singer, a guy who's probably done a lot but I haven't seen him since he did The Beastmaster in 1982, so it was quite a shock to see him now (I keep telling myself just look in the mirror, I've aged worse than these guys). What I remember most about The Beastmaster was the first time Marc spoke - here's this oiled up hunk of a guy playing around with animals and the first line out of his mouth sounds like someone kicked him in the nu.. uh, kicked him somewhere sensitive.
So I start up the movie, again one eye on it, but soon it had my full attention (and a bit of frustration 'cause it's raining like a bitch today and the electricity keeps cutting out) and you know, it wasn't half bad. Compared to the stuff I've been seeing lately, it was freaking good actually. I looked up the synopsis for this movie and got 'two families go to an open house and can't leave'. Wow. That's... thorough.We have two families looking at a house for sale - one is a realtor and his family, he wants to look at the house his business recently foreclosed. The other family is there because they were led by a man and his dog who appeared to them as they were looking at another house. The house they're looking at seems ideal - on tons of acres of wooded area, beautiful house.
One family driving away barely misses a running, bleeding girl and being movie stupid hits a tree. The other family stops and picks them all up and they go on their way to a hospital. Except they end up back at the house. The bleeding girl is frantic and they discover her tongue has been cut out. And they can't get away from the house. This was kind of a duh but they drive in this seeming circle for hours until they finally run out of gas. Right at the house. Duh. And through the whole movie nobody thinks to give the mute girl something to write on to get some info on what the hell is going on. Another BIG duh.
So there's the Hay family, husband (Marc Singer), wife and daughter; and the Thompson family, husband, wife and son. And the mute girl. A recording at the door keeps inviting them to come in and check out all the house features. The house still has all the previous family's stuff but the first night they spend in the living room. They'll get out for sure, right?
The movie fast forwards to two months later. Sure enough they're still stuck there. Every morning warm shaving lather and a sharp straight razor is available in the bathroom, and seven cans of meat stew is in the cupboard (one can for every person). By now their nerves are completely shot. Every attempt to walk away from the place just gets them back where they started. And once in a while they see the guy who led them there, but he always disappears before they reach him. And the families have secrets. Nasty secrets.
In fact, over the course of 102 minutes we find there's really no 'innocents' here. Each person has something nasty in their past. One day they find only six cans of food. Looking around they find that the Thompson mother had hung herself sometime in the night. And things continue on a downspiral.
They can't leave, they can't live with each other, and their secrets come out and people are killed. The ending was somewhat of a duh, kind of obvious and if it was supposed to be a twist, then the movie maker must have thought we weren't paying attention. Oh well, it was far from perfect but it's a good enough story to keep your interest and have you guessing motives and secrets... Marc, you did okay.
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