House (2008)

I've read the book upon which this movie is based. I wouldn't call it a good book, per se, but it at least held my attention. You could have made a perfectly serviceable little move out of the book. The events in the book take place over the course of only a few hours, the pacing was taught, and there wasn't much that would need to be trimmed to make, say, a 100-minute thriller.

So, of course, when some schmucks got around to adapting it into a movie, they threw away about half the book and arranged what they did film into an incoherent mess. The pacing alternates from "GET ON WITH IT ALREADY!" to "Whoa! Hold on, what?". The movie generally seems edited together at random. It sucks. It doesn't even suck in a good way, so that you can laugh at it. There are some laughs but not nearly enough.

Michael Madsen is in the movie. Sort of. I'm not entirely convinced he spoke a single line of dialogue. He shows up and does his patented squinty thing, but every time his character speaks, there's something covering his mouth. Else, his mouth moves a little then it cuts away before he actually speaks. "His" voice also sounds weird. I honestly think he refused to speak and someone dubbed over his lines later. The man is clearly not having any fun. At any rate, he plays the main villain, The Tin Man.

Of the four main characters, the two men couldn't act their way out of a closet with no door and the two women are actually pretty good. Pity the ladies don't get much to do. One of them disappears for almost the entire 2nd act, and the other isn't given much to do but wave her boobs in the camera and dribble pudding down her chin suggestively. Don't ask.

The book turned out to be a Christian horror novel, of all things. At the end, the survivors had to repent and accept Jesus. Now, as a Christian myself, I thought that was pretty neat. However, I feel the novel mishandled the climax significantly. I won't get into why I think that because I don't want to open a can of worms.

But whatever I think the book did wrong, the movie in infinitely worse! There's no hint of any kind of religious message here (Christian or otherwise), or even a basic good/evil moral. No, the two survivors defeat Tin Man with GLOWING COTTON BALLS.

GLOWING COTTON BALLS

GLOWING. COTTON. BALLS

This movie has a spooky little girl(TM) in it. She looks almost exactly like Samara from The Ring. Anyway, Tin Man shoots her and her chest erupts into GLOWING COTTON BALLS. The two remaining characters touch them, thus becoming immune to Tin Man, and then a huge stream of GLOWING COTTON BALLS launches from the girl's chest and burns Tin Man to death. Well, actually, it looks more like he's been encased in asphalt but whatever.

Blah.