House Hunting

Thank god.. focusing on the story...this is how indie films should be made. It's about time we saw more smart horror films and less of the crappy gore that's slopped out these days. The DVD cover from redbox had us expecting something totally different (we didn't expect much actually) but as the story got going we were saw that we were in for an original experience, something we had to actually pay attention to. I'm sure a lot of people who are looking for a blood bath or don't have decent attention spans are going to be very disappointed, but for serious fans of the thriller / suspense genre this is not to be missed. There are a few holes here and there, but even those kept me guessing and opened up interesting questions for the viewer. Hope we see much more work from these people. This is well worth your time if you have a decent attention span.

Initially I had expected something else from this movie as it was brandishing the label "a new chapter in haunted house stories. Brutal, original, and eerie as hell." on the DVD cover.

However, that being said, then it isn't a bad movie, far from it. I enjoyed it thoroughly, despite it not being a haunted house movie in the sense that I had hoped.

The story is captivating and interesting, especially as you are just given small bits and pieces of what is going on. And director Eric Hurt does a good job at building up suspense. Essentially, the story is about two families who are looking for a new house to call home, who happen to come across the same house. A beautiful old house with 70 acres of land, a deal that seems to good to be true. And it was. Once there, the two families find out that they are unable to leave the lot, and tensions start to rise and their pasts come to haunt them.

The house itself was nicely put together, with just the right amount of stuff to make it seem like a scary place, while on the inside, the house seemed like an ordinary, livable home.

The characters in the movie were nicely fleshed out as well, each with their own secrets and skeletons in their closets. And it was the kind of characters that you easily got a liking or a hatred towards, so thumbs up on the character development.

As for the people cast for the various roles, then they had some good names to the cast list. And the reasons for me buying this movie, aside from believing it to be a proper haunted house movie, was because Marc Singer is in the movie. I haven't really seen him since "V" and "Beast Master", so it was a treat to see him on the screen again. Art LaFleur also did a good job in the movie. But most noticeable was Rebekah Kennedy, playing Hanna - the girl with no tongue.

Despite "The Wrong House" being a different kind of haunted house type of movie, it provides good entertainment, and the story is a good one, revealing just enough to keep the audience in the dark and guessing at what's going on. The ending however, well I didn't see that one coming, but it was a really great way to end off the movie.

If the American dream for most families is buying a house, then for the two families headed to what they think is a simple open house, that dream is about to become a nightmare. A psychological thriller mixed in with your traditional ghost story, that is smart, tense and well conceived, overall a good movie with a well thought out plot. Acting wasn't fantastic but this did not detract too much from the movie which was overall quiet enjoyable. Low budget movie with a great story line. I couldn't imagine that this movie would make it to cinema release but it wouldn't be a bad DVD to rent. They need a better DVD cover tho. The picture makes it look like it will be a gory horror, which its not.

This movie could have been so much better, but it was cursed with the original Twilight Zone (1960-64) format: Riveting beginning (5 minutes), dull exposition about relationships (18 minutes), then an interesting ending (2 minutes). This movie follows the same pattern, but the exposition section is over an hour long.

Exposition slows down a movie, but it has its place. Foreign films-especially from Europe-usually commit a good section of the film to exposition. It works in those films, maybe because when you watch a film by Wim Wenders or Ingmar Bergman, you expect it to rest almost entirely on dialogue and a strong focus on relationships. House Hunting (2013) leans heavily upon exposition, but it's in the wrong genre for that. When people watch horror movies they expect it to be plot-driven with a heavy focus on the problem. This movie establishes a great problem at the beginning, then abandons the problem for most of the rest of the movie. Instead of focusing on a solution to the problem, the actors are given s script which focuses on soap opera relationships.

Maybe if I had understood from the beginning this aspect of the film I would have enjoyed the movie more. Their relationships do help them unfold the problem, but not enough. Nevertheless I do enjoy a good foreign film, so maybe the problem is simply in my expectations.

Interesting topic! Not what we expected. We enjoyed it! Not too bad!