El invitado del diablo

What did I just watch?! Another holiday day themed slasher, but this one you gotta see, to believe. It's bad, beyond bad. But it's how ridiculously stupid and inept, you're just so bemused to what you're seeing on screen. Some of the early death scenes are just laughable. That's even before the stalk and slash enters the picture. And Jake Seinfield's over-the-top killer's performance goes a long way to cementing that. Watch this buffed lunatic shooting up on PCP, while crazily laughing at every bruising encounter. However he's not the most irritating character. Yes, there's someone worse. A weird teenager decked out in what looks like mime makeup, while running around playing his electric guitar. And what type of name is Mistake? Oddly creepy character with an identity crisis. With these type of inclusions you just wonder if its definitely intentional in its attempts to raise your eye-brows.

The Bradley family and some of their friends are celebrating Thanksgiving in a remote country home. However this is disturbed when an escaped mental patient decides to crash the celebrations.

As for it being a slasher, it's fairly tame (after such a promising start) and predictably mundane. Some blood here and there. While the kills were rather daft, then actually brutal. Creativity was indeed lacking. But with such poor lighting and shooting it mostly in the dark, just made it hard to make out at times what was happening. The overwrought music on the other-hand wanted to telegraph everything. Just making sure that you knew there was evil around. Director Nettie Peña's handling is rough around the edges, as it's stingy budget shows and no tension whatsoever despite its rural forlorn location. It was dull, when it wasn't centering and using close-ups shots on the jacked-up, bodybuilding killer giggling away and carving up the guests. The rest of the cast give nothing more than disposable performances working with an inane script. There are some names like a very young Vinessa Shaw, Sallee Young (known for 1980 "Demented") and then you got all-rounder Don Edmonds (who's acting/producing on this one).

Aside for a few amusingly dumb moments, "Home Sweet Home" is a lousily plain 80s slasher turkey.

Last night me and my fellow film students decided to watch this film just for fun. It starts off brilliantly with one of the funniest murders I have ever seen in a film. Then it went downhill till it hit rock bottom. The lighting was the worst I have ever seen. Half the time you can't see a thing. When you can it's obvious that someone is just shining a torch on them. The acting is so bad it's not even funny. The characters themselves are seriously bizarre. The guitar playing idiot kid with his face painted white you would imagine is going to be the weirdest character in the family. But no! It turns out that the whole family is messed up. A bunch of alcoholic nymphomaniacs who can't get enough Valium. Then there's the killer. We are given that he is an escaped mental patient. He also happens to be a bodybuilder who can't help but laugh hysterically when he murders people. I've watched a lot of bad movies but I couldn't bring myself to watch this to the end. This is seriously not worth watching.

An escaped mental patient high on PCP stalks and murders a family during the Thanksgiving holiday. The killer's methods are more brutal then usual and he is undisciminating when it comes to choosing his victims, but that still doesn't separate this from the hundreds of other horror movies that hit the market in the 80's. The killer (Body By Jack) has a really annoying laugh too, which makes the film funny instead of scary. I guess that is what sinks this one.

1981 was a memorably dire year. We had assassination attempts on The President and The Pope. A cement walkway in Kansas City fell, crushing over one hundred people. The first cases of AIDS were reported, California was beset by ravenous fruit-flies, and hundreds of Beirut civilians were wiped-out during Israeli bombings. In select theaters, audiences were subjected to a slasher-film atrocity concerning a musclebound PCP freak who escapes from a nuthouse and proceeds to successively kill off members of a family at their Thanksgiving dinner. That film was HOME SWEET HOME.

Groan in pain while you watch famed fitness instructor Jake Steinfeld flex his acting muscles as the cackling killer...somehow he manages to deliriously overplay a character who has virtually no dialog whatsoever. The circumstantial humor in Steinfeld's towering inferno of ham-handed histrionics is, however, the sole glimmer of virtue in this unbearable bagatelle, a bland early entry in the slasher cycle which is surprisingly spare on gore and nudity.

Potentially gratifying for ultra-masochistic bad movie fans, I suppose...in this capacity, I might suggest watching it back-to-back with THE FREEWAY MANIAC.

3.5/10

The only remotely good scene in this film is when the killer mows down an old granny crossing the street. But it's downhill from there. The killer is a beefy muscle-bound type who laughs like a madman each time he kills. Nothing much really happens in the film. The killer makes his way to a house in the countryside where people are having their thanksgiving dinner, and stalks around the house in darkness slowly bumping everyone off. To cover for the lack of budget (meaning lack of gore) almost every death scene was shot in the dark. There's not even a cheesy decapitated head to laugh at. There's nothing. No entertainment value whatsoever. The stalking around in the dark is tediously dull and without suspense.

Slasher fans should avoid this unless you're a completest, in fact any sane person should avoid it. I'm starting to get sick of seeing all these "lost" slasher films that turn out to be bore-fests, why do I bother?