grrgoyl

Watch my video! If I seem painfully nervous, it's because I am. And I'm not reading off a teleprompter, though it sure looks like I am. This is actually version seven or something, and I could have typed the damn post out twelve times over. But hey, something different.

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In other news, Ryan is back to being our friend. He and John had a huge fight, nearly killed each other....literally. Ryan reportedly had bruised ribs, a swollen head and a sprained ankle the next day. It finally knocked some sense into him and he's left him for good. Hooray! So he came to hang out, and Logan, our semi-feral wild thing of a stray cat, made a beeline for his lap like they were long lost buds. He probably misses male companionship (Logan, not Ryan).

Dude, bitches be CRAZY

Finally, that movie review I promised. It's a short one, but well worth it I think.

Home Movie is a tiny indie horror flick I probably breezed over browsing Netflix and added to my queue on a whim, because I certainly have no actual memory of how it got there.

It stars Adrian Pasdar of Heroes fame (hot senator brother of even hotter Milo Ventimiglia), a Lutheran minister who brings his wife and two children to live in an isolated rural cottage, to spend plenty of quality family time together. The entire film is shot on his video camera, Blair Witch style.

It looks like your average home movie (clever title), except the children are noticeably off from frame one. They are silent, sullen, barely even animate objects they're so statue-like. The parents, by contrast, are goofy, playful, cavorting around madly trying to entertain them.

Mom and dad don't seem to even notice anything is wrong with them. Even when they blatantly act out (throwing a rock at dad's head instead of the softball; flinging flatware and even their loaded dinner plates on the floor at Thanksgiving), nothing in the way of actual discipline seems forthcoming.

It's therefore a little hard to buy when we realize that mom is a child psychologist, which means she's either not a particularly good child psychologist or just very, very good at denial.

The children have their own clubhouse that mom and dad are forbidden to set foot in. They also never speak, except in a weird alien-sounding made-up language to each other. "Guys, I told you to stop doing that" mom begs halfheartedly and totally ineffectually.

The kids also display textbook homicidal tendencies, killing insects, small animals, and eventually the family cat (crucified) and dog (beheaded and stuck on a stake outside the clubhouse). So what does dad the Boy Scout leader do one afternoon? Teaches them valuable skills like lock-picking and tying an inescapable noose. Why not throw in knife-sharpening and butchering techniques? In his (very small) defense, the murdering of pets happens AFTER this lesson rather than before. (Although a frog ends up in a vice grip during. How many more red flags do you need, dad?)

There's about five minutes when we're led to wonder if dad has been abusing them when they are found covered in mysterious deep crater-sized bite marks, but this is quickly disproven when they are expelled for attacking a fellow student and biting him repeatedly, and mom realizes they had been biting each other. Okay, NOW she's starting to think something might be wrong with them.

Dad tries his hand at exorcism, in a comically brief scene. When that doesn't work, mom puts them on an intensive regimen of pharmaceuticals (which between you and me they should have been on since the beginning of the film); an interesting study in spirituality vs. science if it were allowed to go any farther, which it isn't.

The pills seem to work and the kids become smiling cherubic little offspring, which somehow looks creepier than when they were killing things. Mom and dad learn too late, however, that not only are they homicidal but manipulative and master thespians to boot. After lulling them into a false sense of security the children turn on them, in a drawn-out climax which thankfully leaves most everything to the imagination rather than showing it, because I don't need my horror gut-churningly graphic.

I agree with most reviewers I would have liked to see what happened earlier, see why the children are the way they are. But for a tiny indie horror flick that no one's heard of, it gets the job done well enough. 77 minutes of my life I don't mind never getting back so much. Though not enough to buy it.