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.

HOME SICK is about a party where this weird man in a blue suit shows up(walking in an extremely creepy way in which he seems to be on a skateboard or some type of cart) with a suitcase filled with thousands of razor blades. He asks the people at the party who each of them hate, and for every answer he slices his wrist with a different razor blade. After he has finished asking everyone, he stands up sings a song and then leaves. Soon after he leaves, everyone who was named begins dying in very bizarre and horrific ways. The characters quickly come to the rather unbelievable conclusion that is is all because of the man in the blue suit, and since one of the people at the party listed off everyone that was in the house, the fates of all the characters are at stake. This may sound like a weird premise for a horror film, but trust me. It works.

What I loved most about this film is that it didn't feel like a modern horror film. This film is probably about as close as a modern day horror film can ever come to replicating the style, atmosphere, music, characters, and gore of a 70s horror film. It comes off so impressively and so beautifully that you feel nostalgic just watching it. I wish that more horror films these days could be more like HOME SICK. The opening scene in the bathroom is a perfect example of a scene right out of something like I DRINK YOUR BLOOD or a Dario Argento film. It comes off so effectively and with such imagination. There's no CGI gore. It's all practical visual effects. They work absolutely perfect.

The performances come off good in a realistic way. The characters in this film are all completely psychotic and insane and their psychosis comes off all too real at times, particularly toward the end when certain events are depicted in such a gritty and guerrilla-style way about them. The music in this is absolutely perfect in setting a dark tone, completely with a sense of eerie detachment and weirdness that feels entirely appropriate. Again, it's just like something Tobe Hooper would have done. The intense atmosphere just fits perfect with the film's style.

In terms of complaints I had for the film, I did find the middle of the film to be a bit slow and moody in a way that came off slightly awkward. I liked it, but I can imagine many horror fans feeling a little bored. I also didn't really particularly like any of the characters, but considering how they are all insane I suppose that was the point. I don't know, it's difficult to really complain about this film since everything is done so deliberately. If you love the bizarre and cheap horror films of the early 70s like the ones I mentioned above, I am really confident that you will love this film. It's a must-see for horror fans for sure. Check it out.

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.

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.

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.