Home mostly follows Carrie (Kerry Knuppe), who has just moved into the new house of her mother. Her mother, Heather (Heather Langenkamp), divorced her father, came out of the closet, and married Samantha (Samantha Mumba). Carrie, who is very religious, isn’t entirely comfortable with her mother’s new lifestyle. But Heather tries her best to integrate Carrie into the life of the house, offering her some responsibility in taking care of Samantha’s daughter Tia (Alessandra Shelby Farmer). While the couple is away on a business trip, Carrie is left at home to tend to her baby sister. But soon, things get pretty strange around the house.
The film is awfully slow, and the setup mostly involves showing just how terrible a person the main character is. It also sets up a pretty clunky premise all in all. Heather and Samantha have just moved into this new home, and Carrie has already decided she’s staying with them. Carrie has problems with her mother’s new lifestyle, but she decides that she needs to stay there anyway. Heather and Samantha are barely in their home for a day when they have to leave for a business trip. And though Samantha doesn’t like Carrie, and already mistrusts her for being late picking up Tia one day, she decides that it’s okay to leave her daughter with her while she’s gone.
The setup doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but that doesn’t really matter. Very little of the dynamic introduced earlier in the film comes into play later on. The back half of this movie largely involves the Christian Carrie suddenly believing in non-Christian rituals, as she attempts to free the home of what she believes to be a malevolent spirit. She lights candles and burns sage, and betrays what little we know of her character through a thoroughly uncinematic sequence of events.
And this is all, of course, building up to a twist. It’s not a terrible twist, as twists go, but there is nothing in the narrative that gives it the emotional weight it ought to have. And it takes so long to deploy the twist that it hardly matters when it finally arrives. And the way there isn’t even very scary. This is a modern horror movie all the way through, concerned mainly with tricks and silliness and jump scares, with nothing substantial at its core.
As expected from yet another direct-to-video horror movie, the production values are pretty bad. And of course, the acting is subpar, despite the presence of a couple of genre veterans. Heather Langenkamp doesn’t seem sure how she’s supposed to be feeling in any given scene, and Samantha Mumba looks uncomfortable portraying their relationship on screen. Kerry Knuppe is pretty bad as Carrie, though it’s hard to blame her given the weakness of the material. Carrie, as written, just isn’t a complete character. Though there is a potentially strong character arc in the concept, it all becomes irrelevant as the film pursues the standard horror pap.
Home is built on a big twist, which is kind of funny given how the poster gives that twist away. I guess none of it matters in the long run. Nothing in this story actually matters. It doesn’t matter that the main character is religious. It doesn’t matter that there’s a lesbian couple in the story. It doesn’t even matter what the twist is. What matters is that this film is identifiable as a horror movie, and it can be shuffled into some theaters with low standards, buoyed off the easy marketability of the genre. As always, we deserve better than this, but there are those who don’t want to give us anything more.
My Rating:
