Coroner’s Report: The House of the Devil (Blu-ray)
Posted by Robert Fure (robert@filmschoolrejects.com) on February 4, 2010 Share
You may not have heard of Ti West yet, but it’s become a safe bet that you soon will. West previously has two direct to video, low budget features to his name: The Roost and Trigger Man. If you are familiar with his previous work, it may be because of the slight buzz that came about with The Roost, an ultra-low budget flick that managed to get some fairly big web sites interested in it that got it some decent exposure. I fell for that buzz, watched it, and didn’t get why it was being pimped around. When The House of the Devil started popping up after some early festival screenings, once again I took notice. I had heard good things, though mostly from fellow critics I routinely disagree with, so I entered said house tentatively and wound up spending the night rather comfortably.
The House of the Devil is a slow-burning film that follows Samantha, a cute college girl trying to make some extra bucks, as she signs on for what she thinks is just a run of the mill babysitting job. If you guessed things don’t exactly go smoothly, you’re correct. There honestly isn’t more to the plot than that.
Kills
In a slow, small movie with very few characters, you’re going to get very few deaths. That’s just part of the trade off. As near as I can tell there are three deaths and two woundings of varying degrees.
Ills
A gunshot to the face blows it clean off (awesome). There are some bodies strewn around, some blood, a thumb to the eye, a slit throat, a gunshot, a stabbing, and another gunshot. Bang bang. Not too many instances of gore here, but the bullet to the face is most excellent.
Lust
Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is very cute, though no one can make high waisted jeans look sexy. Her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig) is also cute, rocking a classic early 80s hair-style and constantly stuffing bits of food into her mouth and licking her fingers. Call me a pervert but I kind of like it.
Learning
If something is too good to be true, it is. Stay away from Satanists and people who are just generally creepy looking.
Review
The House of the Devil is hit or miss with basically everyone who sees it. Some people absolutely love it, others think it’s boring. The more level headed amongst us say that it’s pretty good, worth a watch, but not worth dropping trough and bending over for. Clocking in at about 90 minutes, the movie is full length though not fully filled. The movie is ripe (or rotten) with long stretches of very little happening. Thankfully the girls are pleasant to look at, their characters are well written, and the acting is believable. You like Megan and Samantha, so you don’t mind just hanging out with them for thirty minutes. Then something awesome happens. Then nothing happens for about 30 more minutes. Then Samantha starts realizing this house is scary as shit and the last 20 or so minutes are an enjoyable ride. Anyone who refuses to call the film slow is being blindly kind to it, though I will say the slow simmer approach mostly works. Around the hour mark, you start looking at your watch and wondering when the mayhem is going to come – then when it does, it’s not quite the level of mayhem you expected.
To just finish airing out the negatives, the film is somewhat obsessed with it’s own style, to Tarantino levels. Well, not quite that high. The film was shot on 16mm (so I read) to give it that old grainy look – and a grainy look it does have. The grain is entirely intentional and somewhat distracting. I thought perhaps at first a filter was applied, a la Grindhouse, though with this seemingly not being the case, I wonder if the oversaturation of grain was intentional – plenty of 16mm films have less visual disturbances. The long title credits flawlessly recreate, or slightly exaggerate, the titles of the time, complete with yellow sans-serif fonts and gritty freeze frames. Surely, someone is going to call me an idiot for saying all of this, or perhaps type “that’s the point” in all capital letters, followed by “you didn’t get it.” I get it. I just didn’t care for it. It’s one thing to capture the spirit of a genre generation (see: Hatchet) and it’s another to recommit the sins of the past.
At this point you’re probably expecting me to drop a D or C grade on this film, but I’m not going to. You see, all that said, I liked it. I can’t exactly put my finger on why. Samantha makes dumb decisions. The film is 90 minutes, yet nothing seems to happen. The tension is not exactly built up, rather, we’re tense because we know we have to be. We know the title of the movie, the plot- we know that something bad is going to happen before we even put the movie in the player. Yet, the movie, for most of its run time, does very little to establish the fact that bad is just around the corner. Bad finally does show up and it’s not even quite as bad as we wanted.
Ti West should send a huge bouquet of flowers to his leads – they sell the film completely. If you fail to get on board that Samantha is a nice, cute chick, you won’t give two damns about the 40 minutes she spends just chilling in the house. Luckily, I bought the characters. I liked Samantha and Megan. I liked the idea of what was coming. I liked the shot selection of the film. Heck, even after pointing out that the style was kind of annoying in bits, overall it works with the film and isn’t that big of a detraction. To me, at least. This is a movie that is a definite rental. Even if you like it, there isn’t enough happening to justify the price tag of buying it. And many of you won’t like it, not interested in going with it’s particular flow – and I can’t blame you. This is perhaps the most non-commital review of all time. Clearly there are plenty of things bothering me about it, but when it was over I reflected mostly positively on it. So hey, give it a shot.
Blu-ray
The film was shot on 16mm and is being released on VHS. Picture quality is style, not technology.
The extras are sparse but include some behind the scenes footage that I enjoyed because it shows just how much, and how many people, are involved in a “small” $1million movie.
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