Ever since Blair Witch Project these movies have been popping up all over the place shot entirely with a shaky hand-held camera. The key to making these movies believable is the justification for everything being filmed in the first place. In Quaratine a news crew was trapped in a building full of rabid maniacs, so it made sense that everything was being filmed. In Cloverfield we had to stretch our imagination a bit farther when someone with a camera kept filming all through an alien invasion, but the high quality special effects helped us suspend our disbelief. In Home Movie, the premise starts out fine--a family's holiday home movies slowly tell the tale of demented animal killing children--but sadly instead of keeping it a real story about a dysfunctional family it slips into the psycho horror genre without much explanation as to motivation. At one point we are teased with the idea that maybe the kids are abused and that's why they are acting the way they are acting, but other than a terribly acted exorcism scene during which their drunken preacher dad ties them up and drenches them with holy water, that plot twists goes nowhere. Supposedly their mother is a child psychiatrist but doesn't even recognize her own children's problems or what to do about their behavior other than drugging them with a cocktail of anti-depressants. And we're suppose to believe all of this was being filmed by one family member or the other with the handy dandy camcorder. At times we don't even know who is suppose to be holding the camera. At other times the camera rewinds and replays: huh? And at other times there is suddenly a snowy picture waving around for effect, never mind that cameras don't do that when you turn them on or off. It all ends up being a jumbled mess and if you watch this it will be a long hour and fifteen minutes waiting for something to happen, and you will be let down by the typical tortured screaming woman running through the woods finale.
Review of Home Movie
