The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project, The Open House. I had intended to use my local library's DVD collection for the Project (minus, of course, the two weeks I spend in Door County), and leave movies on Netflix and Hulu in case of emergency. As you're probably aware, there's currently a bloody pandemic, the library is closed, and I only got two weeks' worth of horrible films because I didn't expect the governor to extend the lockdown to April 7. So, it's safe to assume the time has come to open this emergency. At some point last year, Pocaracas responded to one of my posts on the Project by asking me to check this film out. Well, it looks like you got your wish.

• It's 15 minutes and I'm being given remarkably little to work with. So Dylan Minette of 13 Reasons Why plays Logan, a teenage boy who likes to run. That is literally all I know about him, apart from the fact that his father died recently (it's just glanced over, even though we see it). His mother is in debt and has a sister who has a giant house in the mountains that just won't sell, and that's all I know about her. 
  
• It takes 20 minutes into the movie for something creepy to happen, when a woman who looks like Kathy Bates claims she lives there. Though they really try to sell the horror by showing people moving slowly while spooky music plays, even when nothing is actually happening.
  
• While we wait for something to happen, let's explain one of the biggest strengths of 1963's The Haunting. It has a bunch of creepy things, and it builds an atmosphere, and the nature of it all is never revealed, so we're never sure how much of it's real or how much of it's in her head. Case in point, this scene
  
  
  Is she being haunted or is she just going insane? It doesn't make much of a difference, it's still gripping and still terrifying. Going through the movie's TVTropes page while waiting for things to happen, it looks like this is what the movie is trying to go for. But it doesn't work here because it takes over HALF A FUCKING HOUR for the plot to get going at all, and apart from the creepy music, there's  nothing to help set it up. It just plays like a bland as shit family drama with a jump scare every couple minutes.
• On that note, I can't remember a film that's been so thoroughly padded since Saving Christmas and that was the first movie I saw for the Project. I'm over 35 minutes in, and this could easily have been less than 10 minutes.
  
• Why is he surprised that he's not running as fast as he used to when he moved to the mountains?
  
• Is it weird that when I see the black guy coming up to the house, I immediately assume that he's going to die? It could just be that it was spoiled on the TVTropes page, but even without it, it's such a commonly used trope and this film is shit enough that you can't put blatantly trite tropes like this past it.
  
•  Okay, the Kathy Bates-looking woman who claimed she lived at the house is apparently her neighbour. Why did she claim she lived there? Or does she play two roles?
  
• How many scenes of the mom showering do we need? We don't see anything, so the prospect of seeing some tit or bush can't be the answer.
  
• And is there a reason there's no apparent lighting setup in the basement?
  
• Why am I learning more about pilot lights here than at any other time since that one episode of Rugrats?
  
• So, it's well over half the movie's runtime, and for all the main characters know, there's strange noises, and the plumbing is wonky. Eventually, of course, we see that there's an intruder, but the question of why we should give a shit just isn't there. They only get the memo that something is really wrong when there's less than 40 minutes left to go in the film. And why would Mom assume he left his phone by the water heater for several days to mess with her?
  
• So, they come back to find a candlelit dinner with "Silent Night" playing and an old rotary phone is on a platter. Why?
  
• So, by this point, it's become undeniable that someone is breaking into their isolated house and messing with shit. And that this random stranger's going to keep doing it and possibly escalate since the cops aren't going to do shit. So, what do they do?
  
  
  Yup, they keep staying there and they're just killer fodder.
• Even when the killer's gone and tied up Mom and broken her fingers, they don't really leave. They stay for several minutes and talk. Logan does not leave the house and go for help even though they know the killer can come back. And he does. They have a drivable car, Logan's apparently a good enough runner to potentially qualify for the Olympic team, and he doesn't fucking leave.
  
• And somehow, he's removed the SIM cards to their phones, and somehow-er, they don't even know you can still make emergency calls (like, you know, the police) without a carrier.
  
• So, you wear contact lenses and you're pretty much blind without some corrective lenses. Someone you strongly suspect is a killer decides to go for your eyes and remove them. What do you do? A) Shut them as hard as you can? or B) just do nothing but struggle with your eyes wide open? A sensible person would clearly pick A, but since this is The Open House, the answer ends up a pretty emphatic B.
  
• So, it turns out that his being an Olympic-class runner does NOTHING, since, even though he runs for hours, he gets strangled by the killer.
  
• And we never know who the killer is, why he was doing this, or even how he knew about that Shannon and the Clams song that Logan listened to on Bandcamp twice. All we know is that the bad guy won and now he's going to kill at a new open house.
  

Well, there's one positive I have to give this movie: it got me interested in Shannon and the Clams. It's a shame I couldn't get exposed to them via a movie that's actually good.