The Perfect House

The perfect house is another movie, of the thousands already, with an "evil" house having his sway on its residents behavior. The kind of movies, labeled as horror, that i believe what i am going to see, i have already seen it before, but i watch them, just for fun and because i want to.

And this movie is no exception of the rule. Predictable, bad acting, poor story and nothing original. The acting is so awful, especially when the victims are in danger and threatened to be killed, where no action or reaction comes from them. It has some good gory and torture moments, but nothing you haven't seen before, and it was better than this one of course. All movies, especially horror ones, have many similar scenes and stories, and influence is logic and acceptable. But mixing in a movie, stuff from well known movies, like Hostel, Saw, and Braindead for example, doesn't make it any good or unique. Also there's is a total rip off from Dexter, a really bad one and terribly executed.

I am always eager to fresh ideas in a theme that's already been written and seen before too many times, hoping to see something new with a different twist or view, but most of the times, it fails. An evil house, without explanation of its evilness, it's not something people will follow.

Except the gory moments, another good thing in the movie, is the sexy Monique Parent, the real estate woman, but a sexy woman, is not enough or the reason for someone to watch a horror movie.

A total pass from me, and the creators of each low budget and less promotional horror movies, doesn't have to create different accounts to write propagandic reviews and give high ratings, so they can trick people to watch their films.

2 out of 10.

Well, the acting is definitely terrible. I think the wife and the mayor are the worst actors I've ever watched.

The fact that when the guy shows up as a ghost with sunken in eyes and a purple/pale face, the wife doesn't even suspect there is something weird.

Things happen and then they never talk about it or think anything is weird. For example the ghost husband chases the wife around with a knife until she hides in the bathroom. When the real husband arrives she unlocks the door and walks around willingly with him with no reservations about him just trying to stab her.

I can't believe I wasted 90 minutes on this thing.

"I'd go so far as to call The Perfect House one of the most pointless, soulless, ugly, and disgusting horror films of the past ten years...and that's precisely what these filmmakers are after." - Scott Weinberg, FEARnet

Mr. Weinberg's comments are so dead-on, I just had to repeat them. I wished I'd read his review before I wasted $5 on this sub-amateurish torture-porn farce that's really only tolerable when it's making fun of itself, which unfortunately isn't often enough.

The Perfect House is something like a car wreck: a film so poorly acted, so abominably shot and edited that most times you simply can't believe what you're seeing. It's hard to look away from because you can't imagine any filmmaker would expect this tripe to be taken seriously. And that's just the technical aspect.

This is a cobbled-together home-made POS with not one shred of redeeming value as a horror film (or any film). These "filmmakers" are not movie lovers. It's doubtful whether they've even seen a movie or maybe are just incompetent at operating the $200 software package they obviously used to edit with (after they recorded it on their five-year-old Handycam). No, these people are hucksters pure and simple. They know they're pulling one over on you and worse, they want you to know it. Either that, or they are dumber than they obviously assume that you are.

Here's a quick run-down of the film's "plot": It's an Anthology film (of course...since all the 'plots' are ludicrously flimsy and clichéd, unable to sustain a full length film certainly) about an "evil" house that drives ordinary people to commit murderous acts (weak attempts at the type of black humor horror done quite well in EC Comics stuff like "Creepshow"). Almost all the segments feature ridiculously hollow, hammy villains who mete out particularly vile tortures for no reason...to many children, no less. I guess they couldn't get away with torturing animals, thank god. There are few good "effects" --- most of the violence is done in cutaway or is blurred or sped-up to mask the VFX guys incompetence or the lack of budget. Speaking of budget, what ghetto did they film this supposed "dream house" in?

Yes, TPH is gory, gross, and nauseating. Some of the best horror films are. What they are not, is puerile, shoddily made, and insulting. Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, this is not. It's not even fourth-rate swill like "Don't Look in the Basement" or a camp horror film that's a pleasure because it is so bad (the "Sleepaway Camp" films featuring Felissa Rose, who does scream well here). These guys might be able to daydream about being that good one day, but they'll probably just wind up watching these other films on cable.

Just because a film has no money doesn't mean it has to suck. But that requires technique, good camera set-ups, and actors who actually are capable of and want to do a decent job. Oh yes, and a script whose lines aren't complete recycled garbage from bad '60s drive-in fare and actually reflect how people speak, with hints to their characters' motivations and back stories and....

What's the point? If you agree that those things are important, run as fast as you can from this film. It is a dangerous piece of "art" --- simply because making it a success will no doubt egg on other charlatans to follow the money trail with yet another poorly made con job.

I went down to my local video store and picked this one up. The guy at the desk made me show him my ID before buying this. This is very strange because I've only ever been carded once before at this place (despite buying a bunch of rated R movies). The only other movie I've been carded for was a smut film called Lake Fear 2: The Swamp which ends with a pregnant nude woman being crucified upside down and the fetus is ripped out of her and thrown in a fire. So naturally, I thought I was in for a wild ride on this one. After watching it...I have no idea why I got carded. This movie is way more tame than others I've bought, but that's all besides the point.

Here's a list of notes I took while watching the movie: After watching the opening scene, my friend said "I bet this guy kills that family because the dad threw out the guy's weed wacker." That turns out to be the actual motive.

A couple is in the market for a house. Someone forgot to tell the real estate agent that they aren't shooting a p*rno today.

At one point a brother and sister fight to the death. The girl wins...unrealistic. I appreciate the twist, but this would not be the outcome in real life.

Love the makeup work on the guy who got his eyelids cut off. Every time they show his stupid-wide gaze is hilarious.

It seems the writer of this movie hates women. Seriously, the women are called derogatory and misogynistic terms before getting killed in a brutal fashion. Like for real...where does this writer get off?!

This an anthology horror film about a sexy female realtor (Monique Parent, who appeared in countless softcore porn films in the 90's) showing a young couple house where all kinds of horrible things have happened. It's basically the same plot as Hammer's "The House that Dripped Blood" (and the John Ritter TV movie "Terror Tract"). The first story is the best. It's about a very messed-up family--the mother is mentally ill and off her meds, the father may be sleeping with the daughter, and the son has become murderously resentful. It all blows up when they're forced to seek shelter down in the basement during a storm (with a whole lot of knives). I've noticed that when they treat the subject of incest in movies, they're often so circumspect about it that they ironically don't make it nearly as ugly as it would be in real life. It also may be a little hypocritical here because they prominently display this alleged teen incest victim in her underwear (although I seriously doubt the actress is really young a teen). On the other hand, I did appreciate that the subject is treated with some ambiguity and subtlety because NOTHING ELSE in this movie is.

I hate to describe the last two stories as sheer "torture porn" because I really don't like that term. Most people watch horror and porn for completely different reason. Still, the second story is pretty much just unrelenting sadism about a serial killer who tortures and murders victims of both sexes in his basement and has kept one woman alive to periodically sexually assault, but mostly watch him kill the others. This is hard to take very seriously because the acting isn't very believable and there's zero character development, but it did make me question why I was watching this in the first place. When torture goes on long enough, it isn't really "horror" anymore; the term "porn" is not really accurate because only a very disturbed person is going to get turned on by this, but there is something unpleasant and definitely not very fun about it.

The third story, unfortunately, is more of the same except the victims are a whole family (with yet another teenage girl stripped to her underwear) being victimized by their crazy older neighbor. This segment has the only "name" actor in Felissa Rose, who played the transgendered killer in "Sleepaway Camp". I think anybody with a family will find this really hard to watch, and the ending is definitely harder to take than the second. But there is SOME black humor here because the neighbor is set off when the father forgets to return his weed-whacker! Still, it's less funny when he sets on the teen daughter for being scantily clad and promiscuous. I don't know what he has against the younger children. The movie shatters some cinematic taboos here, but it really does it just to do it.

Overall though, I wouldn't describe this movie as offensive, and it certainly does succeed at being pretty grueling. But it is also pretty puerile, definitely pointless (any point it has usually ends up shoved in someone's eye), and just not a lot of fun.