The Happy House

Since they advertised this film as a "horror comedy" it might have been nice if the film makers had indeed included some horror and some comedy. Unfortunately all we get here is a few half-drawn characters and a sparse handful of horror movie clichés.

Long story short - an annoying New York couple stay at a B&B run by an annoying old woman and her dull son. There they play with their cell phones and tablets, meet a boring Swedish butterfly collector and then play with their electronic toys some more.

Once the "horror" starts, it's really hard to care about the fate of these dullards. But don't worry, they don't seem to care much either. And by the time this excursion into ennui sputters to a halt with all the impact of a wet firecracker, neither do we.

D.W. Young's "The Happy House" is a mixed bag. The actors and performances are quite charming and several notches above those found in most super-low budget HD features like this (the female lead is especially effective). It is also well shot and the sound is good.

The story starts as a variation on Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" with some "Tucker and Dale vs Evil" overtones. However, Young's screenplay is all set up and no follow through and degenerates from quirky to sub-par dull about ¾ of the way through. IMDb shows that Young's previous films and videos have been shorts, and the construction of this story bears that out—there's only about 45 minutes of story crammed into this hour and a half.

It's not mentioned on IMDb, but I'd bet that the majority of Young's experience is in live theatre and not film. I say this because he obviously has a talent for working with actors and getting the best out of them—this is an area where low budget films are usually at their weakest, but it is HH's greatest strength. Young also seems uncomfortable with film editing, which makes much of the movie seem like an adapted stage play. He prefers very long, static shots, as though the camera was set up at the edge of a stage and just left to run while the actors stand or sit in one spot and talk. While this does often show off the skills of the actors-- who interact in these dialog-heavy sequences with a rhythm and naturalness that rarely rings false— it doesn't allow the protracted scenes to be edited for pace and is undeniably boring from a visual standpoint. And when young does employ standard editing—over the shoulder shots or povs—they are clumsily handled, as if he didn't really want to insert them, but felt he had no choice. Also, when locations shift between sequences, the screen simply fades to black and then back up again, like a curtain falling and rising. However this technique seems less like a stylistic choice and more like an "I'm doing it this way because I don't know another way to get from here to there."

Anyway, I don't want to sound like I'm ragging on the film. Young does many, many things right. As I said before, he gets very good performances out of his actors (and we all know that horrible acting is usually a low budget film's major weakness).

This movie was just a third of a screenplay and one professional editor away from being a classic indie comedy-horror flick along the lines of Ti West's "The Innkeepers." I look forward to more from all the folks involved in "The Happy House."

This is a silly little movie, not scary, a little funny, and a bit uneven. It is understandable why the ratings are so low. But I still deserves a lot more love than it was given, even if it maybe didn't reach its potential.

First of all, it goes somewhere rather unexpected, which was a lot of fun. Second, the performances were actually pretty great, even working with what could be very cliché characters; they brought them to life in a way much more realistic than other (even better) films may have done.

But for me, what made this film was the likable nature of the characters. I find it hard to connect with a movie when I don't like the people in it. No such problems here.

If you don't mind something that doesn't quite live up to what it could have been, this is a nice, light watch.

This movie had a good story but the acting, lighting, editing, music and direction skills killed it. You could easily tell who had more experience in movie making than the rest. It was humorous at times and it had a taint of Hitchcock in it but not nearly enough. Had the actors been professional or perhaps skillfully directed it may have caught more attention, instead it made it laughable at times and the music was amateur. The house keeper was funny, her character led me to believe she was evil but I was wrong. The movie still had me interested, the tension toward the end kept me alert. It was a good attempt and I feel the cast all learned something from it to enhance their skills toward their next film.

Their relationship on the rocks, a young Brooklyn couple heads to a remote B&B to work things out. But from the moment they arrive at the Happy House it is one disaster after another, and they soon begin to suspect they have wandered into a real life horror movie.

Well, unfortunately this film does not include Siouxsie Sioux's "Happy House" on the soundtrack. But what it does have is some odd pseudo-intellectual conversations centering around Nouveau Recontextualism and a Bukowski reference, as well as a butterfly scientist (who loves Nabokov).

Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times does not love this movie. He writes, "The film, a sleepy, low-budget affair, merely enacts a series of horror movie clichés, as if that were enough. Its bland actors and wit-free script do nothing with the familiar elements but present them." That is not without merit. The movie tries to be a horror comedy, but is very light on the horror and equally light on the comedy. While still enjoyable for its characters, there is really nothing memorable and this comes off as an experiment that was not completely successful.