I recently caught Home Sick on a whim at the Sidewalk Film Festival. I expected an average, post-90's low budget horror film. What I saw was a well-polished, deeply disjointing, gore-fest. Seemingly taking cues from horror masters Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci, Home Sick pays genuine respect to the slowly-rotting slasher genre, while adding a breath of fresh air to it as well.
Set somewhere in Alabama, Claire (Lindley Evans) comes home from California to visit her mysterious past. When visiting her friends, no one seems welcoming. This tension becomes more agitated when she and her acquaintances are confronted by Bill Moseley's (!) character, a big-grinning, blue-suited stranger who happens to carry a suitcase full of razor blades. After performing a bizarre blood-letting ritual based on the kids' hatred for others, he calmly exits. Panic, murder, hysteria, sex, drugs, guns, and chili dinners ensue.
The level of gross in this movie far exceeds anything that's come out in the mainstream since the days of Romero. Instances of broken bones, ripped-off flesh, disembowelment, and knives in the head plague this film. It's not just the gore that makes it special, but also the characters' involvement with death. This is best conveyed in a scene with a coked-out Candice (Tiffany Shepis) and her recently butchered mother. This scene is worth a review in itself.
Besides the first class gore effects, the characters add a certain dynamic to the film. Whereas most teen / young adult horror films revolve around a cast that is pulled from stereotypical high-schoolers (The Jock, The Geek, The Face, etc.), Home Sick incorporates kids that already seem pretty crazy. For fun, they sit around drinking beer and watching gory films like Evil Dead Trap 2. They look pale and have dark circles around their eyes-even the redneck kids. They work at places like the bowling alley, the funeral home, and the school cafeteria. When it hits the fan, these characters seem like they've been preparing for it all their lives. For example, a creepy guy approaches Candice and shows her a Polaroid of a curb-jaw victim he discovered. Her response is a brilliantly sarcastic `Oooh, gross.'
Due to the intense violence, there's absolutely no way this film could be showed at the local Cineplex, unless it's linked to some sort of festival. I can only hope that this comes out on video as it is a testament to real independent filmmaking.
