The House of the Devil Review
Hey guys, Mr. LeVack here. I'm no professional movie critic, but my girlfriend and I had a fun time making fun of this movie after watching it, so I slapped together this review for laughs. I hope you guys get a kick out of it.
The description on IMDb.com is an apt one: "In the 1980s, college student Samantha Hughes takes a strange babysitting job that coincides with a full lunar eclipse. She slowly realizes her clients harbor a terrifying secret; they plan to use her in a satanic ritual."
However, what this blurb fails to encapsulate is the shoddy story-telling and perhaps most criminally, pacing, that "The House of the Devil" plagues itself with. Minutes into the movie, our stereotypical witless female protagonist, Samantha, responds to a babysitting ad offering her services. Soon after, viewers are treated to a scene that foretells common moods we'd see throughout the movie; those are, boredom and monotony. Samantha waits in vain at the front steps of the campus Student Affairs Office for her potential employer, only to head home empty-handed.
Then we are again given one of the most engaging scenes only masterful cinematography can muster, as for the second-time we're greeted with a view of Samantha walking down what seems like her perplexedly long hallway, wasting more time that could have been spent developing the plot. Of course this is all to build up the anxiety surrounding her perplexing employer, but combined with an unremarkable soundtrack, it's not hard to get sidetracked when we're continually given un-immersive scenes.
That's not even the worst of it. Once we've arrived at Mr. Ulman's (the employer's) house, we discover that she's actually needed to look after her mother-in-law when he and his wife spend a night on the town, or so I gathered from their formal attire. As soon as they're out the door, Samantha goes into typical Nosy Nancy mode, snooping around the house although there's no evidence from her perspective to suggest anything'samiss. The Ulman's rationale for lying about the position seems quite sound as let's face it, what attractive college student would enjoy spending their evening enveloped in musty old lady smell?
All sense aside, Samantha snoops around the house, revealing to the viewers a few troubling visuals, including corpses on the other side of a door, but again Samantha herself does not see this nor the murder of her friend Megan, whose service as an awesome best friend goes unappreciated by the self-righteous Samantha, who's too good to tear down job posters but not too good to extort $400 from an old man.
My girlfriend did note that perhaps Samantha was acting so curiously after discovering a photo of the Ulman'sson, but it was never a secret they had one, Mr. Ulman revealed by his own admission that they had a son, only he had grown up and moved out of the house. We'd later discover their son was in fact the hobo-looking fellow who shot Megan in the head for being a bitch (or maybe it had to do with the whole Satanic ritual, but whatever), but I maintain Samantha had no reason to act as paranoid as she did, unless there was some presence resonating from the house itself that was pushing her to such states (Slenderman?), but that was never discussed nor reasonably implied.
Eventually Samantha finds herself in a dark cupboard or something, passes out, and then awakens in the midst of a satanic ritual (this bit was actually pretty cool), where the mother-in-law is revealed to be a scary-looking, grotesque monster who probably has the same plastic surgeon as Mickey Rourke. While this situation was all very terrifying at first, especially as they drew an insignia of blood on her stomach and then poured the same substance into her mouth, the Ulman's quickly proved to be the worst movie villains ever.
Samantha frees herself from her binds, bitch slaps the old lady, stabs Mr. Ulman with a piece of glass or something on her way out, flees from the room, cuts open their son's throat, and stabs Mrs. Ulman in the back as she knelt in prayer. Note to self: cultists are pussies. Fleeing into the night with Mr. Ulman in pursuit, Samantha shoots herself in the head when the elderly gentleman declares, "It's too late!" or some other such cliche. Immediately we cut to a hospital scene where the nurse subtly implies Samantha is pregnant. Of course we're led to believe the ritual impregnated her with some sort of demon spawn, but I think it's more amusing to assume she was actually just knocked up by a college frat boy.
I'm not sure where the praise comes from for recovering 1980s horror glory. The movie fails at building suspense, considering we already know something is terribly wrong with the whole babysitting position after Megan is shot in the head for not being the babysitter, which occcurs soon after Samantha had arrived at theUlman residence. We thus don't feel the suspense as Samantha does, because we already know shit's going down while she just looks like a poor fool to us stumbling into her own demise, and what clues she discovers on her own are insubstantial at best. I also have a hard time buying into the whole demonic side of the movie, as the movie doesn't attempt to provide any true depth to the ritual or the cultist. For all I know, the mother-in-law could have just been terribly deformed, they could have given her a drug for the hallucinations she has after the ritual, and like I joked earlier, she could have been knocked up prior to the event.
I know those are not the conclusions we're meant to draw, but the fact we're left to put the pieces together ourselves just seems lazy on the writer's part. They don't even provide enough detail to entice me into drawing conclusions; it's just the kind of movie that after watching I look back on and say, "Well that was lame," and switch to an episode of My Little Pony.
The description on IMDb.com is an apt one: "In the 1980s, college student Samantha Hughes takes a strange babysitting job that coincides with a full lunar eclipse. She slowly realizes her clients harbor a terrifying secret; they plan to use her in a satanic ritual."
However, what this blurb fails to encapsulate is the shoddy story-telling and perhaps most criminally, pacing, that "The House of the Devil" plagues itself with. Minutes into the movie, our stereotypical witless female protagonist, Samantha, responds to a babysitting ad offering her services. Soon after, viewers are treated to a scene that foretells common moods we'd see throughout the movie; those are, boredom and monotony. Samantha waits in vain at the front steps of the campus Student Affairs Office for her potential employer, only to head home empty-handed.
Then we are again given one of the most engaging scenes only masterful cinematography can muster, as for the second-time we're greeted with a view of Samantha walking down what seems like her perplexedly long hallway, wasting more time that could have been spent developing the plot. Of course this is all to build up the anxiety surrounding her perplexing employer, but combined with an unremarkable soundtrack, it's not hard to get sidetracked when we're continually given un-immersive scenes.
That's not even the worst of it. Once we've arrived at Mr. Ulman's (the employer's) house, we discover that she's actually needed to look after her mother-in-law when he and his wife spend a night on the town, or so I gathered from their formal attire. As soon as they're out the door, Samantha goes into typical Nosy Nancy mode, snooping around the house although there's no evidence from her perspective to suggest anything'samiss. The Ulman's rationale for lying about the position seems quite sound as let's face it, what attractive college student would enjoy spending their evening enveloped in musty old lady smell?
All sense aside, Samantha snoops around the house, revealing to the viewers a few troubling visuals, including corpses on the other side of a door, but again Samantha herself does not see this nor the murder of her friend Megan, whose service as an awesome best friend goes unappreciated by the self-righteous Samantha, who's too good to tear down job posters but not too good to extort $400 from an old man.
My girlfriend did note that perhaps Samantha was acting so curiously after discovering a photo of the Ulman'sson, but it was never a secret they had one, Mr. Ulman revealed by his own admission that they had a son, only he had grown up and moved out of the house. We'd later discover their son was in fact the hobo-looking fellow who shot Megan in the head for being a bitch (or maybe it had to do with the whole Satanic ritual, but whatever), but I maintain Samantha had no reason to act as paranoid as she did, unless there was some presence resonating from the house itself that was pushing her to such states (Slenderman?), but that was never discussed nor reasonably implied.
Eventually Samantha finds herself in a dark cupboard or something, passes out, and then awakens in the midst of a satanic ritual (this bit was actually pretty cool), where the mother-in-law is revealed to be a scary-looking, grotesque monster who probably has the same plastic surgeon as Mickey Rourke. While this situation was all very terrifying at first, especially as they drew an insignia of blood on her stomach and then poured the same substance into her mouth, the Ulman's quickly proved to be the worst movie villains ever.
Samantha frees herself from her binds, bitch slaps the old lady, stabs Mr. Ulman with a piece of glass or something on her way out, flees from the room, cuts open their son's throat, and stabs Mrs. Ulman in the back as she knelt in prayer. Note to self: cultists are pussies. Fleeing into the night with Mr. Ulman in pursuit, Samantha shoots herself in the head when the elderly gentleman declares, "It's too late!" or some other such cliche. Immediately we cut to a hospital scene where the nurse subtly implies Samantha is pregnant. Of course we're led to believe the ritual impregnated her with some sort of demon spawn, but I think it's more amusing to assume she was actually just knocked up by a college frat boy.
I'm not sure where the praise comes from for recovering 1980s horror glory. The movie fails at building suspense, considering we already know something is terribly wrong with the whole babysitting position after Megan is shot in the head for not being the babysitter, which occcurs soon after Samantha had arrived at theUlman residence. We thus don't feel the suspense as Samantha does, because we already know shit's going down while she just looks like a poor fool to us stumbling into her own demise, and what clues she discovers on her own are insubstantial at best. I also have a hard time buying into the whole demonic side of the movie, as the movie doesn't attempt to provide any true depth to the ritual or the cultist. For all I know, the mother-in-law could have just been terribly deformed, they could have given her a drug for the hallucinations she has after the ritual, and like I joked earlier, she could have been knocked up prior to the event.
I know those are not the conclusions we're meant to draw, but the fact we're left to put the pieces together ourselves just seems lazy on the writer's part. They don't even provide enough detail to entice me into drawing conclusions; it's just the kind of movie that after watching I look back on and say, "Well that was lame," and switch to an episode of My Little Pony.
