I remember first seeing HOME MOVIE several years ago when I was first starting to get into found footage. A friend owned it and passed it on to me. I remember being shocked by it and intrigued. It was so different from BLAIR WITCH PROJECT but still fascinating.
Since it’s been many years I wanted to re-visit the film to see what I felt now.
HOME MOVIE is the story of a family. The father is a pastor, the mother is a psychologist, and they have two children, a girl and a boy. They have just moved to a new area that is out in a rural area and are looking for a new start. With the use of a brand new video camera, the family captures the moments every family shares, the holidays, the special occasions, the good times…and the bad. It’s the bad times that start to compound though as issues at home between the husband and wife and with their children begin to fracture the family. Something is wrong, and we as witnesses can only watch as things spin out of control.
Outside of a silly voiceover meant to be a video camera system notification, the film handles the found footage aspect very well. What we see are vignettes of the family and so it doesn’t stretch the reasoning of WHY they are filming. There are definitely a couple of wincey jokes in it that did not age well – two racist voices the father does as a joke – but it slides by because you have to remember too that these could be coming from a dad who’s just being a dad. Still wincey.
The acting is very well done, especially the children, who are stone-faced and silent for much of the film. The heavy lifting is with the two adults but the kids have to keep up their end or the whole thing falls apart. As for the adults, they do a great job. Some of the writing brings some melodramatic moments and moments that are very broad, but it all works. The film does a good job, in not completely subtle ways, of making this a nature versus nurture, science versus religion story as they try to figure out how to help their children.
The dawning horror comes slowly and it’s here where we start to ask – really – as the kids do things that there is no way you could just shrug off and not take seriously. This too though is where we see the hubris of the parents, who had taken drastic steps to help their kids, specifically the son, and who feel like they each have what it takes to help them. It doesn’t take long to look at the news and see parents who didn’t take the dangerous misdeeds of their children seriously enough and it’s the same here.
This is a good, creepy film, and there are aspects of it that pre-date SINISTER. My issue comes mainly with the idea that these parents let things go so far that they just strain credulity. Pair that with some moments that make you question WHAT is happening and the cause of the issues with the kids and it can make the film pretty frustrating. I appreciate leaving things for the viewer to figure out but it can also feel as if the filmmakers didn’t fully commit one way or the other and just wanted to leave it in the air.
As a found footage film it works well. They stick to any sorts of rules the subgenre has in place and features an interesting and chilling story that isn’t one we’ve seen many times, if at all in found footage. There are some very creepy themes and some great scares, and it’s a solid movie. I still really enjoy it, though I can see the flaws more clearly now. Even so, it’s definitely worth a look if you’re a fan of these movies.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1267319
3.5 out of 5
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