Reel Review: Home

Forced to stay in a new house with her mother and her new wife, the religious Carrie now lives with people she is at odds with. The story takes place over the first two days at the strange house, as Carrie’s newlywed mom and her wife leave for a business trip and she must now watch over her young stepsister. As creepy occurrences lead to full blown terror, Carrie must fight to save her little sister.

Our first introduction to Carrie is her being dressed up “because it’s Sunday” and praying out loud at the dinner table while her new family is visibly uncomfortable and looking at her like she’s a weirdo. The first thing she does is hang up a cross, she apparently sleeps with a bible on her nightstand, she goes to church her first full day there, and of course she listens to Christian music.

In terms of storytelling and writing, the character of Carrie is nothing but a stock character at best — based on the laziest of cliches. The whole religious/gay marriage conflict in the middle of a horror film felt a bit distracting from the film itself and came across as a weak plot mechanism to create some sort of drama to raise the stakes. Right away I started to get a bad feeling about HOME.

The film meanders for a while once it hits the second act. The two moms leave on their business trip, some odd things happen here and there, and…well that’s about it. There’s the religious aspect to create conflict. There’s the house that used to be lived in by an old man who, when he died, was rumored “to never have left”. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t seem to know how to use all of this to create a compelling story.

While watching her stepsister, and amidst the slightly odd but minor goings on, Carrie and her friend Aaron, a boyfriend type who comes to visit, decide to rid the house of any unwanted spirits. They do this because, after about 20 minutes, Carrie decides that’s what must be in the house. So after a quick Google search, they find a do-it-yourself exorcism that is “sanctioned by the church”. After that, they are on the couch kissing in no time. I mean, after explaining that sequence of events, do I really need to say why I didn’t exactly dig this movie?

By the time anything really starts to happen and the “horror” of this horror movie starts to take place, there’s about fifteen minutes left… and at that point I just didn’t care anymore. The terror at the end probably should have happened at the half way point, and the story could have gone from there — a true good (Carrie) vs. evil (the spirit in the house) scenario. At least then, her over the top religious convictions would have actually meant something.

To say the least, Home was a disappointment. The bright spot in the film was seeing Heather Langenkamp turn in a solid performance in a horror film again. She does a really good job here. Maybe it’s enough for some hardcore horror fans to see Langenkamp again in a film like this in order to watch Home, because that’s the only real reason to.