Customer Reviews

Home Movie

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Starring Adrian Pasdar ('Heroes') and Cady McClain ('All My Children'), 'Home Movie' tells the tale of a young family who has recently moved to the isolated countryside of upstate New York. At first, all seems perfect. The couple, a pastor and a child psychologist, is happy and in love. The house is beautiful. And, they have two adorable children. Soon after, however, the happy couple's perfect life begins to spiral out of control as their ten-year-old son & daughter start to show signs of aggressive and psychotic behaviour. As time passes, the children become worse & worse, eventually becoming a fight for survival between the parents and the children, all alone in their picturesque country home.

'Home Movie' continues the recent trend of point-of-view horror/thriller flicks like 'Rec,' 'Paranormal Activity,' and 'Cloverfield,' which has been helping to deliver unto the horror genre some of the scariest films in a long time. 'The Blair Witch Project,' while not the first point-of-view horror film, set the bar for fear high and would be one of the major trendsetters for this style of film-making. It's cheap, it's effective, and (what I think makes it scariest) it's more personal than standard film-making. 'Home Movie' is one of the films that very much takes advantage of this more 'personal' film-making style.

Technically speaking, the film is rather impressive. For what was clearly a very modest budget, they pulled a couple of marginally recognizable stars in Pasdar and McClain, thus guaranteeing at least adequate performances in what could have been a couple of difficult roles. The script is solid and keeps the pace going steady without jumping too fast into the kids going crazy, utilizing a nice, slow descent into madness. The shakicam, an element many people worry about with POV films, is not too bad and much of the film includes the camera just sitting on a table or desk instead of being hauled around by someone. It never gets bad enough to cause any kind of motion sickness like 'Cloverfield.' One issue I did have with the film is simple: These are two of the worst parents I've ever seen in a movie. No matter what the kids were doing for a huge portion of the movie, the children were never punished, never scolded, never lectured. One would think that a pastor and a child psychologist would be familiar with the necessity of discipline. It took one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen a kid do before the child psychologist could realize that maybe, just maybe, her kids were a little screwy in the head. Granted, no parent wants to believe their kid is bad. . . but, it's pretty textbook that violence, over-aggression, and abuse of small animals is a pretty serious indication of what's to come. However, this is forgivable for the sake of the story, even if it does cause a few head-shaking moments.

Overall, 'Home Movie' is a expertly creepy & freaky horror/thriller with some of the best suspense & tension I've seen in a while and one hell of a wicked conclusion. It also continues to prove that point-of-view horror is a great tool that can be used in independent cinema to keep budgets low and keep scares high.

Final Verdict: 8/10 - This is the kind of movie that will make you not want to have kids.

-AP3-

Adrian Pasdar and spouse must deal with their two kids, whose actions are increasingly cruel and bizarre. The worst thing is that they are isolated. Also, they live in denial about just how bad the problem is. Had these kids been sent into custody and treatment, maybe they wouldn't have....oh, I won't spoil it. Rent it and be freaked out!

This is one of the new modern 2011 horror movies that is reality based. I could not stop watching it, even though it was slow in parts, still an edge of your seat movie. Better than Paranormal Activity 2 and the Last Exorcism, but on the same page.

Adrian Padsar is excellent in this movie, the kids are good, the wife the same. All believable home movie charactures with a very scary situation going on at home. I highly recommend.

This is a well-written thriller done on a low budget. It uses the same kind of hand-held, literal home-movie style that made the more recent movie "Paranormal Activity" a hit. This 2008 film has now unfortunately often been relegated to remainder shelves. But it deserves to be brought up front and center again. It's ominous and intelligent.

It shows how the hyper-active, desperate attempts of a couple to recreate the picture-perfect family turn horribly against them. Their children are twins, although not the usual identical twins that we've come to expect in horror films. Here we have a little boy and girl who have carried over their womb alliance into the larger world. Their closeness seems to have engendered a strange indifference in them, a propensity for cruelty to all things not them.

The blood-bonded twosome find the evil obverse to every "wholesome" activity their parents propose. Their father tries to interest them in playing baseball; they find another use for a baseball bat. Their parents don Halloween and Easter costumes and cavort; they assume diabolical masks to make them scarily impenetrable, impersonal. The father reads them bedtime stories; they take that as impetus to start to turn into fairytale monsters themselves.

The script ties up all the noose-loose ends - and the picture ends on just the right turn-about-is-fair-play image, with maximum macabre effect.

For an indie film it's ok.
I have two qualms about the movie:
1.) The pacing of the movie should have been a bit faster, although I understand it's a "Home Movie", but some parts were dragging when it should have picked up.
and
2.) One thing that I did not like is the lack of background of the two children. The viewer should have been given more insight to their upbringing.
Overall the movie is creepy during some of the scenes regarding some of the activities the children do to some of the animals.
Enjoy!!

I was expecting this to be an indie film that would drone on in the background as I surfed the Web. I tuned in because this stars Adrian Pasdar (Near Dark) and Cady McCain (All My Children) and I wanted to see what these rarely seen actors deigned to do. But I found myself watching intently because the storytelling is so strong. Told entirely through handicam recordings made by the nuclear family, it looks like non-working class liberally educated parents move their two children to some pastoral setting (bobo hippies are not my favorite people) but their marriage seem to on edge and they don't really have a relationship with their silent children. And the colors are all wrong for a magalogue lifestyle. When the camera records the ugly truths, I should have sensed hysteria and outrage but apparently the parents are sunk so far down in shocked sorrow that they are the walking depressed which isn't that far off from being high functioning retards. When the kids dare the audience to not look away, I instantly flashed to Michael Haneke's reasoning for Funny Games starring Naomi Watts.

I bought this junk. This movie goes on and on. The kids are freaks but WE as the viewer will never know why. There is some gore, but forget about seeing any. There is a quick shot of the crucified cat... mom and dad are drugged... but again, why??? The best part of the movie was the end. Only because it was over!