Truly Dreadful Film

Charming and brutal

A Masterpiece!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Decided to give this one a go after reading a pretty positive review here on IMDb. My thoughts on the film is far more negative however.It is filmed in a Blair Witch style with shaky cameras filmed by the actors themselves in a documentary style fashion. Its not believable done however, These idiots seem to be thinking more about the camera than themselves in the most absurd situations. Storywise i has some interesting aspects going on but the en result is just horrible, the script would seriously have needed someone more talented to check it out and fix up the worse parts. The children are horrible actors and it just feels fake the entire movie through. The movie is a waste of time and i cant recommend it to anyone really, It is a shame because with "classic" camera-work and a bit of touching up on the script it could have been pretty decent.Shite movie.

My response has a few spoilers so if you've not seen this film, here's a warning before you read on.I quite understand why some viewers did not like Home Movie, however I actually found this film quite disturbing and very intelligently rendered. Of course there will be lots of folks who hate the film because while it is a horror film, it is not scary and refuses to explain itself in broad and excessively obvious ways. It relies more on intimation that explanation. Too many horror films use jumps and starts to compensate for a poorly scripted story and fortunately nowhere in this film is there any such pandering to horror sensationalism and clichés. Instead it relies on a really solid idea - young twin sibling who are being abused off-camera by their father become increasingly sullen and withdrawn as they refuse to participate in their parents' on-camera charade of domestic bliss and pretense of happy families.These kids fit right into the generic "evil child" mold of super-intelligent children who are always one step ahead of adults that refuse to think the worst of their darling cherubs. Yet unlike some evil child films where the kids are just evil because the kids are just evil, Jack and Emily are given a motive for their actions, which is that their upstanding Lutheran pastor father, David, has been abusing them and getting away with it. David is, of course, so hell-bent on hiding his abuse that he tells his kids that its good to have secrets as he plays happy families on camera and constantly tries to get his kids to participate in the contrivance. Meanwhile their psychiatrist mother lives in ignorance and denial of what is really going on and is more concerned about her professional career and treating other child patients than her own children. In order to get close to her own children, she needs to treat them like patients, and then congratulates herself for "curing" them. This is quite a disturbed family and its impressive how skillfully the film achieves this without being blatantly obvious about it.The scene where the children refuse to pray before the thanksgiving meal, with their father wearing his pastor's uniform, demonstrates the anger and resentment the children feel towards him and what kind of monster of a man he really is - ignoring their protestations and cries for help and continuing like nothing is happening. He has a compulsion to record himself being a good dad to somehow leave a record of what a nice guy he is, but as the children continue to misbehave, his (self) deception unravels. The exorcism scene is truly disturbing as he would prefer to blame Satan for his children's behavior than look more closely at himself. In the car when the mother says to the kids that they shouldn't keep secrets, Dad pipes up and says, "Secrets can be good". Warning bells! The scene where the father is preparing his sermon demonstrates how contrived his outward persona is - even the words of his sermon seem contrived and hollow. Everything about this guy is pretense and deceit. It is little wonder that the children attack a child named Christian.The escalating levels of animal torture and mutilation, as they graduate from bugs and goldfish to increasingly larger creatures, of course point to the inevitability of the children eventually attacking their parents - it comes as no surprise, yet the film plays on our knowledge of this, using it to create a sense of dread. This film is not about trying to guess the surprise ending. There are no surprises. But it's not the "what" that makes this film interesting, it's the "why". One rarely finds probing character studies in horror films, but in Home Movie we are given just that.

Horror films are one of my favorite genres, unfortunately it is a rare case to find a decent one. I enjoy realistic and disturbing horror films. Not the ones that try to ride out on big breasted women running from demons that jump out on the screen every 15 minutes. This film is short, and to the point. From the very beginning there is a sense of tension that continuously builds until the brutal ending. I rarely leave a film of this type with a disturbed mind, but this movie certainly did the trick. The acting is perfect from some moderately unknown names. Adrian Pasdar was enjoyable to watch as he played a key role in the tension and the relief occasionally. The hand-held film effect may seem to be overdone, but this film utilizes it differently and even mentions at times how stupid it is to be filming their own horrors. I strongly recommend this film.

Filmed in the cinema verite style becoming so popular lately, "Home Movie" affords its viewers an interesting perspective. In some ways, while watching the siblings, I recalled the brothers of "Funny Games"--psychopathic game-players out only to fulfill their own sadistic desires.In a sense, that's very much what this film is about.For those versed in some psychology, it quickly becomes apparent (within the first ten minutes of the film, I might argue) that the movie's twins are displaying classic, if incredibly overplayed, symptoms of APD--antisocial personality disorder, or, if you will, sociopathy/psychopathy. (The two differ in minute ways but the difference is rather negligible when reviewing a film.) In a very telling throwaway line, the mother can be heard shouting to her husband, "They're not psychotic"--which, indeed, they aren't. Psychopathy vs. psychosis is the difference between Ted Bundy and Ed Gein--or, for the horror movie buffs, it's the difference between Hannibal and Leatherface. Psychotics cannot tell reality and are often unaware of rules--psychopaths know the rules. They simply do not care.And that is what we are presented with, here--two children who simply do not care about the established rules, who display a distinct lack of empathy, conduct disorder, manipulation, and, later in the film, the ability to flip the 'charm' switch on-and-off at a whim. I would like to point out, though, that the symptoms are over-dramatized--no child with APD tendencies is going to crucify a cat, place a frog in a vice, make a goldfish sandwich AND impale the head of the family dog. They'll probably stick to one of those things, if any.Which is why I find it better to view this movie not as a character study of two future psychopaths, but a character study of two future horror movie villains--a look at the "Funny Games" brothers when they were children, all the symptoms present but exaggerated to make for an entertaining film.And entertain it does--the acting is exceptional as the parents try desperately to hold onto a fraying thread of hope that their family may yet be saved, until a heart-wrenching scene roughly ten minutes from the film's end when we see the father finally and definitely fall to pieces. Take that, add intriguing and twisted foreshadowing throughout the first half of the film, and you have what I would consider a rather brilliant piece.I see some people complaining about the plot, and some of the holes and errors made throughout--but I would argue that this is less a film that requires a definite plot with a neat wrap-up, and more a character study of an unwinding family and the two future horror film slashers they're raising.