Home Sick

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.

If it's a dose of graphic old school gore you're after then Home Sick, with its regular and excessive scenes of non-CGI carnage, definitely delivers the goods: feet are sliced, heads are crushed, fingernails are torn out, teeth are smashed in, bodies are cleaved in two.

It's the stuff between the splatter that takes the film down a notch or two.

Writer E.L. Katz and director Adam Wingard have taken an offbeat approach with their storytelling, and the cast perform accordingly, putting in some decidedly strange performances; the result is a head-scratchingly bizarre movie at times, equal parts sadistic horror, wacky splat-stick, low-brow comedy, and avant-garde art-house weirdness, an awkward mixture that is certainly memorable, but not always that easy to digest.

Bill Moseley hams it up as a creepy stranger with a suitcase full of razor blades; Tiffany Shepis rolls around manically in her dead mother's blood; Tom Towles slaps his thighs as his son and his friends play with an assortment of firearms: occasionally the silliness works, but at other times it's just too eccentric for its own good.

Home Sick is worth watching simply for all the lovely red stuff—and Shepis getting her norks out (again)—but it's certainly not for everyone.

Adam Wingard's HomeSick is a treat, but only if you can stomach some truly jarring moments of gore and have one demented sense of humour with the capacity for.. let's just say… abstract thought. Low budget, practical effects driven schlockers like these are a dime a dozen, but this one is worth it's weight in gold simply for going that extra mile to make it memorable and stand out from the cheaply drawn masses. It starts out slow, with an eerie opening credit jingle that could suggest all kinds of horrors to come. We meet a group of friends going through the motions of partying and quarreling. Tiffany Shepis does a wonderfully nutty little riff on her scream queen shtick as a positively slutty little minx who likes to rail cocaine at her graveyard job and swing a mop around with gale force. Anywho, this weird little troupe is kicking back one night, when into the apartment walks a very ill adjusted stranger named Mr. Suitcase (the legendary Bill Moseley), and sits down on the couch like he owns the place. He's chipper, charming and affable to a terrifying level, as he opens up his suitcase full of razor blades that he calls "gifts". He asks them all to pick one person in their life they hate and want to wish dead, slicing a nasty gash on his forearm for each answer. The seemingly autistic member of the group (Forrest Pitts, in a priceless performance of comedic eccentricities) foolishly blurts out that he wishes everyone in the room dead, and then the real fun begins. A giant masked killer begins stalking and killing pretty much every character around in ways so brutal your balls will shrink into your pancreas. Seriously, it's like they sat down in a boardroom and systematically came up with every squirm inducing way to inflict violence on a human body, and gave their results to the storyboard artist and effects team. It all comes to a chaotic, deranged finale when they take refuge with Uncle Johnnie (the late great Tom Towles, always brilliant) a gun toting chili enthusiast. That's where the film comes off the rails, but it's seemingly deliberate and actually quite hilarious, as everyone pretty much goes feral and loses the plot all at once like a coked up kindergarten class in overdrive. There's some thought and care put into the writing, and as such the characters, however odd or over the top, seem like real people, albeit some strange and undesirable folks. The film oozes unsettling atmosphere right from the get-go, fervent in its aggressively weird sense of style and never taking the conventional route that most horrors end up with. Like I said, if your sense of humour has an affinity for the bizarre, demented and off the wall (think Tim & Eric meets The Evil Dead meets John Waters), you're gonna love this little gem. On top of being a laugh riot, it's just freaky enough to earn it's horror classification, something which many films in the genre just can't claim. As to why it's called HomeSick, though? Couldn't tell you, and there's no reference to it the entire time. Perhaps it's called that for the normies, the folks who watch it expecting a run of the mill, cookie cutter slasher and feel uncomfortable with the oddness, getting "home sick" for their bland fare. As for me, I'm right at home up the weird end of the alley, and love this type of thing. I hope you do to.

An enigmatic and seemingly psychotic stranger (Bill Moseley) crashes a home-coming get together among some friends in Alabama. Brandishing a suitcase full of razorblades, he demands that everyone at the party give him the name of someone that they truly despise, which they very reluctantly do, but when they people named begin to die the friends become fearful for their own lives because one of them made a flippant comment at the party. Now they have to come up with a plan to survive, with the help of a chili-loving redneck gun enthusiast (Tom Towles).

Aside from Moseley and Towles, the acting from most of the others is pretty dire (Especially Matt Lero as Timmy, who seems content to channel Eric Freeman's 'acting chops' as Ricky from Silent Night Deadly Night 2). However this is easily overlooked as the movie is more or less just so much gory, weird fun and left me impressed.

Eye Candy: XZanthia and an extra get topless and make out; Tiffany Shepis also loses her shirt

My Grade: B-

DVD Extras: Commentary with Director Adam Wingard and writer/ producer E. L. Katz; deleted opening sequence; Bill Mosley interview segment; 'In a room where darkness counts' featurette; and 3 short films ("the Girlfriend", "1,000 year sleep" & "Laura Panic")

I love the way this movie works. The story, the actors, the writing is all fantastic. I don't like slasher movies but this one is funny as hell and smart. Its also crazy. Just the right mix of sex, drugs, blood and funny creepy people. Mr. Suitcase is scary as hell. I wish more movie were this much fun to watch. It will hold you to your seat from start to finish. See this movie......or DIE!!!!!!