Starring Adrian Pasdar ('Heroes') and Cady McClain ('All My Children'), 'Home Movie' tells the tale of a young family who has recently moved to the isolated countryside of upstate New York. At first, all seems perfect. The couple, a pastor and a child psychologist, is happy and in love. The house is beautiful. And, they have two adorable children. Soon after, however, the happy couple's perfect life begins to spiral out of control as their ten-year-old son & daughter start to show signs of aggressive and psychotic behaviour. As time passes, the children become worse & worse, eventually becoming a fight for survival between the parents and the children, all alone in their picturesque country home.
'Home Movie' continues the recent trend of point-of-view horror/thriller flicks like 'Rec,' 'Paranormal Activity,' and 'Cloverfield,' which has been helping to deliver unto the horror genre some of the scariest films in a long time. 'The Blair Witch Project,' while not the first point-of-view horror film, set the bar for fear high and would be one of the major trendsetters for this style of film-making. It's cheap, it's effective, and (what I think makes it scariest) it's more personal than standard film-making. 'Home Movie' is one of the films that very much takes advantage of this more 'personal' film-making style.
Technically speaking, the film is rather impressive. For what was clearly a very modest budget, they pulled a couple of marginally recognizable stars in Pasdar and McClain, thus guaranteeing at least adequate performances in what could have been a couple of difficult roles. The script is solid and keeps the pace going steady without jumping too fast into the kids going crazy, utilizing a nice, slow descent into madness. The shakicam, an element many people worry about with POV films, is not too bad and much of the film includes the camera just sitting on a table or desk instead of being hauled around by someone. It never gets bad enough to cause any kind of motion sickness like 'Cloverfield.' One issue I did have with the film is simple: These are two of the worst parents I've ever seen in a movie. No matter what the kids were doing for a huge portion of the movie, the children were never punished, never scolded, never lectured. One would think that a pastor and a child psychologist would be familiar with the necessity of discipline. It took one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen a kid do before the child psychologist could realize that maybe, just maybe, her kids were a little screwy in the head. Granted, no parent wants to believe their kid is bad. . . but, it's pretty textbook that violence, over-aggression, and abuse of small animals is a pretty serious indication of what's to come. However, this is forgivable for the sake of the story, even if it does cause a few head-shaking moments.
Overall, 'Home Movie' is a expertly creepy & freaky horror/thriller with some of the best suspense & tension I've seen in a while and one hell of a wicked conclusion. It also continues to prove that point-of-view horror is a great tool that can be used in independent cinema to keep budgets low and keep scares high.
Final Verdict: 8/10 - This is the kind of movie that will make you not want to have kids.
-AP3-
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