House Hunting

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

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.

Despite starting off very badly, clichéd, and woodenly acted, I choose to stick with this movie about two families (one headed by ol' Beastmaster himself, Marc Singer) who go out to look at a quaint little house nestled on a 70-acre wooded lot only to find that some entity is keeping them trapped there. It got better and for awhile this psychological paranormal horror film was hitting the right notes and aside from some quibbles as the movie moved on some minor, one major (that I'll neglect to go into more detail about as I wish to keep this review spoiler-free), I ended up enjoying the film more than I had anticipated. It's currently streaming on Netflix so give it a go, just be aware that it has flaws.

Two families visit an isolated show home only to discover that they can't leave. The house doesn't lock them in, they just can't leave the area as whichever way they turn they find themselves back at the house.

The house kindly provides food and not so kindly lots of ghostly mind games that drive a wedge between the families and each other.

Initially I found myself enjoying the film but the creators quickly ran out of ideas and it found itself in the realm of one of those horror flicks that makes the rules up as it goes along and never really explains anything.

Starring Art LaFleur this could have been something quite special if the creators had thought the whole thing through. It's like the television show Lost (2004) where it became evident the writers never had some clever ending to explain everything that happened and just went with the generic one everyone had guessed in episode 1.

The Good:

Art LaFleur

Decent start

The Bad:

Poor middle & end

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.