The House of the Devil: Film Review

Director/writer Ti West has managed to take a story that is at the very most thirty minutes long, and stretch it into over an hour and a half. It's a fairly impressive feat in my opinion. Especially when one considers the story doesn't really drag. On to the actual movie. Damn it, what an almost complete waste of time. Successes first.

The build up is actually quite good. The movie pays great homage to Hitchcock, and horror films of yesteryear. There are a lot of really tense scenes with a minimalist approach. No dialogue. Maybe some music, but not necessarily. Just a bump here, or a spooky noise there, the actress and the camera. That's it. And they work well. 90% of the scenes in the movie didn't end the way I thought they would. I found that cool. I expected what I'd seen a million times, but didn't get it. It was refreshing.

But while the build up is good, the ending...the payoff we've been waiting ninety minutes for...sucks! It's completely illogical, and could never happen. And this movie takes place in reality, not in some alternate universe where the audience is expected to throw certain rules out the window.

Not only is the ending total bullshit, but the reaction by the characters to the sudden change in situation is completely counterproductive. I can't say a lot without giving details away but I'll say that the ending starts one way, then there's an abrupt change. The characters, but one in particular, react in such a way that made me wonder why the hell the scene began the way it did in the first place. The best word I can think to use for the actions of the characters is, again, counterproductive. Just doesn't make sense.

Another reason this movie is such a huge letdown is because the best scene in the whole movie is smack in the middle. It's all down hill after that. It was such an incredible scene that I thought I'd stumbled upon a horror masterpiece or something. I thought I was in for an amazing show. Not the case at all.

Finally, this film suffers from an almost complete lack of back-story and character exposition. Now, I will say the lack back-story for main character Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) really is not a problem at all. We're around her enough...well, the whole movie...that the information we are given about her is plenty sufficient.

My complaint lies in the lack of back-story for the family who hires Samantha to babysit. We have no idea what these people are about, or where they came from, or what their motivation was to do what they did. It just really pissed me off...a lot. It wasn't mysterious; it wasn't clever to not include it, the lack just made me angry. Director West could have given me anything about these people and it would have been infinitely better than what we have here.

Damn it.