thomas4cinema

“it’s only four hours and all I have to do is watch tv and then it’s over” and “but I need the money” are not good sentences for a pretty female movie character to speak that intends to see the credits roll at the end. In particular so when the film is by horror-thriller weird person-of-the decade Ti West. Aren’t these the sentences most clearly indicative some something being seriously, I mean, SERIOUSLY wrong in a movie called “The House of the Devil”? Ah, why does she not listen to her friend Megan and take the “baby” sitting job despite her employer being beyond weird…? Now … the number of clichés processed in this movie in not always terribly creative fashion is legion. The phone call to an anonymous public phone. The house in the middle of nowhere. The baby sitting where there ain’t no baby. The woman upstairs. The sounds from the attic. The girl dancing around the house with headphones so she cannot hear what’s going on. The old man with the cane… no, really, like Trigger Man before, this is not original. What makes it great is Ti West’s willingness to treat it as if it was. He is not shy, he pulls all the stops and invents a ghost in the attic meets Rosemary’s Baby horror flick and he does not seem to give a damn about the fact that there are already hundreds of films trying to do the same. I think Ti West is a proud person… maybe even arrogant, and he throws this arrogance into the film to create his own version of horror movie history – the rough cut… I have the same conclusion as for Trigger Man: this film should be too full of clichés to be entertaining, but strangely enough, it is… and creepy!

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/house_of_the_devil/