Reed Alexander's Review of 'Housebound (2014)'

Yeah, this was a pretty cheeky movie. I can appreciate that about horrors that also want to be comedies, though it's very dry humor and isn't for everyone. I think the cast and crew were from New Zealand. I'm not fully positive about that, but they definitely had the dry humor that would typically go with the region.

There was one portion they took a wee bit too seriously towards the middle of the movie; in all honesty, it just started to get boring. What's supposed to be a horror comedy turns into a mystery thriller that moved too damn slow for about thirty minutes. Which reminds me, I'm thinking about changing the 30 minute rule to, "If the movie bores me for more than 30 minutes at any point," then I stop watching and write my review based on what I've seen... I digress. For a hot 30 minutes, this fucking movie wanted to be The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and still tried to be cheeky. But it just couldn't pull it off both at the same time. Instead, it dragged on and on and I almost turned off the movie.

All in all, if dry humor is your thing, you may actually like this movie. It does eventually pick back up where it left off and it does get funny again. I ended up somewhat ambivalent about it myself. I'm not going to recommend it but you may wanna give it a go.

SPOILERS!!!

Scooby-Doo effect. I don't know, I want to say it was done right here. Again, I find myself ambivalent about it. The thing is, you think throughout the beginning there's a ghost haunting the house, trying to get justice for its murder by generally terrorizing the inhabitant (almost bad ghost, no vengeance), but it turns out that some crazy guy has been hiding in the house since he was a teenager because he witnessed the murder and was hiding from the real culprit.

Sooooo, it's the wig picker who turns out to be the murderer and there is no dead person trying to communicate. I'm not sure why they decided to go with this idea. What's wrong with having a ghost as opposed to a crazy person living in the walls? The thing is, I like the idea of a crazy person living in the walls. It was kinda how they resurrect the cheeky humor of the movie when it started to get too serious. Had they gone with a real ghost, it might have continued to set the tone wrong and killed the mood even more.

I find myself thinking, could they have done a ghost and made it funny? The crazy guy in the walls was a hoot once he was fully introduced. Maybe it's in cases like this when the Scooby-Doo effect is okay. I'm not even sure why it seems appropriate here. I want to think that they could've continued down the supernatural road, and come up with the same results, but maybe not. I don't want to just leave it at "You'll know it when you see it," but I find myself with a lack of explanation outside of that.

There was something that sorta bothered me. I get that they wanted the female lead to seem more of an upstart punk than a bad-ass, but they occasionally made her too much of a frantic ninny. It's a delicate tightrope to walk, I get that, but she seems like the kind of girl who could have handled the antagonist a bit better than she actually did. I don't know. Maybe I'm being too critical. She did attack the guy's face with a cheese grater. That was pretty awesome.

In the end, despite this movie's clear flaws, it was watchable. It was fun, and that's all that matters. That being said, I still can't give it my recommendation due to the giant doldrums in the middle.