Phillemos Review of Home Movie

Home Movie (II) (2008)

"Against our better wishes, we have to keep our attempted murderer kids in the house overnight." Come on, you can do better than that...

[4/10 · 10 November 2008]

I tried really hard. I wanted to like this movie so badly. There's a lot to like about it -- solid acting performances, underlying tension between the two parents, a lot of which seems to stem from the father's own abuse as a child, a slow buildup of psychotic activity by the kids leading to an uncomfortable sense of fear. But the movie's climax ruins it all. After the two kids snatch their friend and take him to their secret hideout out back, where he's bound and gagged, the father finds them and apparently the kids are charged with kidnapping and attempted murder. Then there's a cutaway scene of the two parents are sitting in front of the fireplace. They tell the camera that, because it's Easter Sunday, "Against our better wishes," the police are allowing the kids to stay at home until their arraignment the following morning. Right there, I turned to my friend and we both said, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." I don't care whether it's Easter, your birthday or Christmas, the police aren't going to let you stay at home if you're facing attempted murder charges because you just wrapped a classmate in trash bags, tied him up and tortured him, even if you're a kid. And of course, this leads to the kids systematically terrorizing, and, seemingly, murdering their father and torturing their mother, who presumably is on death's doorstep herself as the movie ends. (Which brings up another problem; by the time the movie ends it's clearly the following morning, so shouldn't the police be back by now to take the kids to their court hearing?) The attacking-the-parents plot line is fine. I expected that was going to happen at the end. I wanted it to happen. But surely the directors can come up with a better mechanism to get to the climactic conclusion than this. While there's a lot to like here, the lazy writing runs it all. A disappointing 4.