It’s easy to freak
people out with food. Just make a character eat something moldy or crawling
with bugs and audiences will squirm, or present something delicious and reveal
that, surprise, it’s actually the liver of a census taker that is spruced up
with fava beans and a nice Chianti. House of Spoils, a new horror
film from Blumhouse Television and Amazon, serves up some creepy culinary
concoctions, but other than a few banal haunted house trappings it’s not all
that scary and ends in the dumbest way possible.
Ariana DeBose gives a strong performance as
the main character who is known only as “Chef,” an aspiring restaurant owner
who comes to find that her new digs are haunted. Chef's story is considerably
more interesting when it’s dealing with the harrowing yet decidedly
non-supernatural realities of opening a new business and not touching on
anything otherworldly, and DeBose and her supporting cast lend a strong core to
a screenplay that doesn’t deserve the effort, especially because the characters
are written so thinly. The actual ghost story bits are lacking, especially the
resolution, which might just be one of the most baffling things I have ever
seen in a horror film. The ghost's motivation seems downright silly if I
understood it correctly, and the fact that I don’t know for sure speaks to a
lack of clarity that smacks of bad writing rather than an invitation to
thoughtfully ponder what was just shown.
When the film is utilizing tried-and-true
horror techniques like the typical long, silent walk down a dark hallway that
raises stress with every step because you just know that something is going to
pop out at any second it works well enough. But tense moments such as these are
almost impossible to screw up and are so omnipresent in the horror genre that
it doesn't feel like I should give House of Spoils props for
this, especially because I've always been someone who is easily scared. Horror
aficionados might not even blink at these moments, especially because they
never really pay off. Sometimes a spooky hallway is just a spooky hallway, and
even when an old lady ghost is around the corner any resulting scare that might
occur feels cheap. When it’s not offering spooky hallways and old ladies, House
of Spoils leans heavily into the aforementioned food horror thing,
which is more gross than anything else in this context. There are only so many
times you can watch someone get surprised by an army of cockroaches in a
soufflé before even this queasiness wears thin.
House of Spoils has a loose
feminine message to it that I appreciate, even if it is vague, unfocused, and
sloppy. It may be hard to be a female restaurateur in a man’s world, but this
message gets lost a bit in the quagmire that is the rest of the film. If you’re
looking for scares this Halloween season look elsewhere. You won’t find any
in House of Spoils.
House of Spoils is now available
on Amazon Prime.
This review wasn't published in the Keizertimes but you can visit anyway at www.keizertimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment