The Home: Bad Storytelling is the Only True Horror Here
By Liz Braun
Rating: C
I like looking at Pete Davidson’s goo-goo-googly eyes. They’re pretty much the best thing about his new thriller, The Home.
Directed by James (The Purge) DeMonaco and co-written by DeMonaco and Adam Cantor, The Home has all the murky and unnecessarily complicated plot developments, tricky dream sequences, illogical decisions, dubious backstory details and daft red herrings that give the horror genre such a bad name.
The Home has neither haunting atmosphere nor paranoid madness to recommend it; it’s just a weak story, badly executed and dragged along until it launches into a blood-spatter bonanza in the last five minutes.
Pete Davidson looks scarier than his own movie
Come on, people.
The Home stars Davidson as Max, a misunderstood artist/petty criminal who has grown up in a foster home. He mourns a dead older brother and can’t quite find a place in regular life.
Our misfit hero gets into trouble with the law — again — but instead of jail gets community service. He has to work as the janitor at an old folks’ home for four months.
The geriatric facility he’ll be working at is full of pleasant seniors, but it does have one locked floor that Max is forbidden entering.
Of course, he soon ventures up there. It’s creepy as hell and full of pale, wheelchair-bound, barely alive creatures who leak blood and tears from every orifice. Barf. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Max befriends various old people at the home, but not before witnessing weird stuff going on — oldsters having bondage-y sex while wearing face masks, for example, or someone having a massive face bleed for no particular reason. At night, he often wakes to see that his locked door is ajar; he hears screaming from the floors above and finds it impossible to sleep in this charged atmosphere. And he has terrible nightmares.
None of this is scary or tense-making, alas.
On the plus side, he befriends several of the home’s residents, including an elegant woman named Norma (film and Broadway great Mary Beth Peil). John Glover turns up as some kind of social co-ordinator at the home, and Bruce Altman plays the facility’s suspicious doctor. Almost everyone is vaguely weird and furtive in some way.
Eventually, Norma tries to warn Max that things are not what they seem at the nursing home. Defenestration and ghastly perforation follow for her. You won’t care.
Some questions: What is the mystery of the fourth floor? Why are constant warnings about an incoming hurricane and environmental disaster playing on TV news in the background? What’s the deal with horror films and toolbox dentistry? Who came up with that deus ex machina “scientific” hocus-pocus to explain things? What’s with the Overlook Hotel photos (the joint from The Shining)? Wait, there’s a dog?
Answers: That blood looks fake, bruh.
The Home. Directed by James DeMonaco, written by James DeMonaco and Adam Cantor, possibly in crayon. Stars Pete Davidson, John Glover, Bruce Altman, Mary Beth Peil. In theatres Friday, July 25.