Home Sick

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.

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!!!!!!

Bill Moseley portrays the Suitcase Man, who crashes a party of twenty somethings and asks each of them, who is one person they hate and would like to see dead. His suitcase is full of razor blades, btw. Pretty upset that old Suitcase stopped in and a little scared, they all give him a name, but one guy makes the mistake of naming the whole bunch at the party should die (the guy is an idiot, and was just being a dick). Soooooooo, not only do the people they named start to end up in ultra gory deaths, but the whole group is now under siege from a creepy superhuman death machine. This is a film that could have been made by Herschell Gordon Lewis, and would be a gore classic. The gore effects are pretty cheap, but effective, and the story is pretty original. After several deaths have all ready occurred, the head goofball, decides the best place for the survivors to go to fight off the killer, is with Uncle Johnny (Tom Towles) who is a chili connoisseur, and also has a house full of many many weapons. This is a seventies style slasher movie, but with a real attitude, and way over the top on just about every level. All I can say, is "Home Sick" could have been a Masters of Horror 2-part episode, and might have been the best one. Very very gross, extremely and I mean extremely gory, and a good sense of humour that gives a wink and a nod to gorehounds. Take a look at the reviews at IMDb, and they all pretty much agree with me, that this is a must-have. Although Moseley's role is pretty small, he is highly effective in his usually creepy self. But most of the kudos go to Tom Towles, in one of his best and funniest roles ever. If you don't like small independent productions operating on a shoestring, but making the most out of every nickel, you should probably stay away, because this is for the fans that consider H G Lewis, the Godfather of Gore, and would love see more of his brand of gore films. "Home Sick" is his brand of gore, and mine too.

The DVD is great, and has a commentary which I expect to watch tonight. It should be a hoot.

I really enjoyed this movie. I thought the cinematography was pretty stunning as well. I didn't understand the whole movie at a few parts,so I think editing could have been a little better, but it was still a great film. I was really impressed with Mosley's performance, as always, as well as Lindley Evans who appears to be a newbie. Hope we see more of her. I'll finish in saying that I saw it at a film festival, but I haven't heard much about it since, which is somewhat of a disappointment. I'd like to know when and where it will be available. Does anyone know?

Edited for length

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.