The Hamiltons

Plot

Trying to move on with their lives, and keep their family together after the untimely demise of their parents, the four Hamilton siblings are left all alone to fend for themselves. At first glance, the Hamiltons seem like an ordinary family, and they will do everything in their power to adjust to their new neighbourhood; however, troubled Francis' video camera reveals that there is more to the grieving newcomers than meets the eye. After all, is it normal to keep people captive in your basement

Cast

Nobody I was familiar with.

Verdict

I made a booboo, I watched The Thompsons first, I didn't realize it was a sequel! That I quite enjoyed so upon booting The Hamiltons up I was fairly excited, whoops that was another booboo.

The Hamiltons focuses on this dysfunctional vampire (Of a sort) family. The trouble is the film is cheap, looks cheap, sounds cheap, is cheap and though I watch a lot of indie movies and am generally unphased by this The Hamiltons came across unforgivably so and was very distracting. I wish it had distracted me more then I might not have noticed how terrible the rest of the film is, it's lifeless, it goes nowhere, the characters are wretched and the narration is so tacky it takes you away from what you're watching (But not in the way you'd want).

This isn't a vampire film, this is barely horror.

Rants

Let me be clear, I'm not overly fussed about budgets. A few years ago I remember watching one called Rednecks vs Aliens? I think. It looked like it had been recorded on the oldest VHS recorder imaginable and by someone who was having a seizure from start to finish. But this didn't matter because the film was oddly enjoyable. I don't care about budget but I've always said, keep in line with your budget. If you have a three figure budget, don't make a movie about aliens invading earth.

Breakdown.

Ugly Lifeless Poorly made.

This was one of the films from the After Dark Horrorfest and like most of them it was incredibly poor. The film is painfully slow. It might have worked as a 30 minute short but as a feature film it bored the hell out of me. The film tries to set up this mystery as to what it is they are doing and why they are doing it but by the time it was revealed I had already lost interest in the story.

Also, the acting in this film is incredibly poor, especially the older brother, who at times is laughable. This film was obviously made on a low budget but I can forgive the low production values. You work with what you've got, lots of great films have been made on a tiny budget (night of the living dead). However, what I can't forgive is a lack of talent. The writing and acting were downright horrible and if that's the case then the budget is irrelevant because the film is going to suck. They were clearly trying to make this an art house film but instead they just made a stinker that will put you to sleep before the first hour.

Without effective indulgence of the supernatural or the poetic motivating nuances of humanity, all this creative team has to hope for is effective usage of its middling, unoriginal elements. 'Party of Five' gone maniacal then genetically unescapable there's little rooting interest because the singular non-homicidal element is a second-rate bland awful-acting 'Wes Bentley' mopester. In fact, all of the acting is skin deep. Even though the dark-haired women appeal, the salaciousness is kept to a minimum. No nudity here. Also lacking are sufficient buckets of blood. All sensations are kept at a teasing, safe distance...an unfortunate fact considering the given name of the directors is 'butcher.' Only the soundtrack, the droning angsty alt-country and the tense fluctuating score provide any palpable tension. Sometimes some static storyboarded compositions add appealing low-angles that adds to the malaise...but for a film that calls itself horror, I did not even get close to flinching once. Perhaps a greater emphasis on societal rejuvenation through blood intake, scenes directed with varying geometric shapes outside the square, and a sustained focus on playfulness through the family's maliciousness or traps sympathetic characters need to escape in order to escape their dilemma would have improved my opinion, but this was not a good start to my excursion through horrorfest.

... all the money (that's Greek idiom, which means that it's on the spot)! Because we're not talking about your average family (at least that's not how I imagine the US of A ;o) ). But it's best not to know anything else from this movie, just that this is a thriller/horror, with some crazy family folks. The actors might not be up to any academy award standard, but they still do fit the bill here quit nicely.

Some scenes will require the viewer to stomach a few things (although "veterans" might just only suppress a yawn), but it is necessary for the story, as you will found out. So the violence never is as over the top as some other movies (also described as gore porn, because it's too much violence), but still enough/too much for some people. After that warning, I'm leaving it up to you to decide if you want to watch this "nice" little "b-movie" ...

I saw this film at Cinequest, the San Jose Film Festival, in March of 2006. The Hamiltons is a movie with writing and directing credit going to "The Butcher Brothers". I think this is a name we will be seeing more from in the future. They've managed to put together a good old-fashioned scare fest, with some very powerful shocks along the way, all while using very basic gore and makeup effects.

The movie is about a group of grown siblings, whose parents have died, who are living together as a family unit, trying to be a "normal" suburban family. But they have a terrible secret. Part of that secret is that they abduct and kill people (mostly lovely young women). The rest of the secret is what keeps us involved throughout the mayhem that follows.

They've managed to create an atmosphere similar to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, without being quite so gruesome or so unrelenting. Mixed among the powerful killing and torture scenes are scenes of banal domestic dysfunction. They are obviously big horror fans and sprinkle the movie with references to the movies genre fans love.

My only complaint is that they overindulge in camera tricks. Some of the tricks are very effective. In the pre-credit scene a woman is killed, but the violence occurs in a series of extremely rapid cuts (I'm guessing maybe 3 per second) which keeps us from quite seeing what's happening. This allows our bloody imaginations to do much of the work and keeps us from noticing how simple the make-up effects are. I would like to have seen them use this technique again, but instead they went on to try every camera trick they could think of.

The youngest brother is camcording much of the family action, he says for a school project. This gives the directors an excuse to have many square-cropped, bouncy scenes, with jagged edges around the objects and low resolution. Other scenes are grainy with a shot-on-videotape-in-poor-lighting look. Much of the movie is in high-resolution, beautiful 35mm. Then, even more distractingly, they start mixing up the resolution and cropping mattes, so that we get a high resolution square shot, supposedly from the camcorder, so the actor can look good in close up. There's a couple of scenes where the shot alternates between two actors in dialog and one of them is shot in the grainy tape-look format while the other one is in high-res 35mm. Nearly all of the violent scenes are augmented? by quick-motion, tracers, vibrating cameras, or something else to add impact not present in the action itself. I'm sure they had fun playing all these camera games. The problem is that it draws us out of the story. I spent much of the movie's time thinking about such things, instead of wondering what they were going to do to those poor girls next. There are a few soundtrack scares, but they don't overdo this.

If it ever gets released, I'll want to see it again. The camera tricks do not make the movie unwatchable, they're just distracting. It's a much better movie than a lot of low-budget horror and it left me with the kind of feeling I get from the old 70s and 80s slashers, but it's not as graphic.