Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home features one of the craziest killers ever to grace a trashy 80s slasher: a musclebound escaped mental patient who injects PCP under his tongue. Within minutes, this gibbering, wild-eyed, spittle-flecked loon (overacted with relish by body-builder Jake Steinfeld) has throttled a drunk, stolen his car, and callously ploughed down an old lady as she crosses the road (leaving a bright red splash of blood all over the windshield).

Having introduced us to her drug-fuelled juggernaut of a maniac, director Nettie Peña then acquaints us with her equally memorable collection of eccentric victims-to-be who have gathered at a remote woodland ranch to celebrate Thanksgiving: lovers Scott and Jennifer (who can't keep their hands off each other), ex-record company executive Bradley (exploitation producer/actor Don Edmonds) and his big-breasted girlfriend Gail (Leia Naron), hot singing senorita Maria (Lisa Rodríguez) and her boyfriend Wayne (Charles Hoyes), Bradley's young daughter Angel (Vinessa Shaw) and his irritating teen mime-artist/magician/rock guitarist son Mistake (Peter De Paula).

With its colourful characters established, the stage is set for what could easily have been one of the most awesomely absurd slashers of all time, but what follows completely fails to capitalise on its potential for seriously demented horror (surprising considering the involvement of Don Edmonds, director of infamous Nazisploitation flick Ilsa–She Wolf of the SS, a man who knew a thing or two about trash cinema).

Rather than a smörgåsbord of exploitative excess, Home Sweet Home turns out to be a surprisingly reserved affair, with director Peña missing virtually every opportunity to deliver outrageous nudity or gore: most of the characters are dispatched without the need for expensive or time-consuming special effects (ie., they're bloodless and boring); Mistake, who is begging to be gutted like a pig from the word go, suffers a frustratingly bloodless death, electrocuted by a high voltage cable (he could have at least burst into flame or exploded as the current surged through his body); and the film's hottest babe, Maria, gets down to her bra but is killed before baring her jubblies (whereas any self-respecting movie psycho would have ripped off her underwear before delivering the death blow).

Home Sweet Home is just about worth seeing for Steinfeld's unbelievably OTT performance and De Paula's mind-bogglingly bizarre face-painted fret-board widdler, but given the promise of the off-the-wall opening scenes, it can only be viewed as a bit of a disappointment overall.

1981 was a memorably dire year. We had assassination attempts on The President and The Pope. A cement walkway in Kansas City fell, crushing over one hundred people. The first cases of AIDS were reported, California was beset by ravenous fruit-flies, and hundreds of Beirut civilians were wiped-out during Israeli bombings. In select theaters, audiences were subjected to a slasher-film atrocity concerning a musclebound PCP freak who escapes from a nuthouse and proceeds to successively kill off members of a family at their Thanksgiving dinner. That film was HOME SWEET HOME.

Groan in pain while you watch famed fitness instructor Jake Steinfeld flex his acting muscles as the cackling killer...somehow he manages to deliriously overplay a character who has virtually no dialog whatsoever. The circumstantial humor in Steinfeld's towering inferno of ham-handed histrionics is, however, the sole glimmer of virtue in this unbearable bagatelle, a bland early entry in the slasher cycle which is surprisingly spare on gore and nudity.

Potentially gratifying for ultra-masochistic bad movie fans, I suppose...in this capacity, I might suggest watching it back-to-back with THE FREEWAY MANIAC.

3.5/10

The only remotely good scene in this film is when the killer mows down an old granny crossing the street. But it's downhill from there. The killer is a beefy muscle-bound type who laughs like a madman each time he kills. Nothing much really happens in the film. The killer makes his way to a house in the countryside where people are having their thanksgiving dinner, and stalks around the house in darkness slowly bumping everyone off. To cover for the lack of budget (meaning lack of gore) almost every death scene was shot in the dark. There's not even a cheesy decapitated head to laugh at. There's nothing. No entertainment value whatsoever. The stalking around in the dark is tediously dull and without suspense.

Slasher fans should avoid this unless you're a completest, in fact any sane person should avoid it. I'm starting to get sick of seeing all these "lost" slasher films that turn out to be bore-fests, why do I bother?

Last night me and my fellow film students decided to watch this film just for fun. It starts off brilliantly with one of the funniest murders I have ever seen in a film. Then it went downhill till it hit rock bottom. The lighting was the worst I have ever seen. Half the time you can't see a thing. When you can it's obvious that someone is just shining a torch on them. The acting is so bad it's not even funny. The characters themselves are seriously bizarre. The guitar playing idiot kid with his face painted white you would imagine is going to be the weirdest character in the family. But no! It turns out that the whole family is messed up. A bunch of alcoholic nymphomaniacs who can't get enough Valium. Then there's the killer. We are given that he is an escaped mental patient. He also happens to be a bodybuilder who can't help but laugh hysterically when he murders people. I've watched a lot of bad movies but I couldn't bring myself to watch this to the end. This is seriously not worth watching.

An escaped mental patient high on PCP stalks and murders a family during the Thanksgiving holiday. The killer's methods are more brutal then usual and he is undisciminating when it comes to choosing his victims, but that still doesn't separate this from the hundreds of other horror movies that hit the market in the 80's. The killer (Body By Jack) has a really annoying laugh too, which makes the film funny instead of scary. I guess that is what sinks this one.