Home Sick

A gathering of obnoxious douchebags is inexplicably interrupted by a weird dude (a cameo-ing Bill Mosely) with a brief case full of razor blades. The weird dude starts slicing up his own arms and makes everyone tell him the name of one person they hate. Soon there after, a masked killer begins murdering the people they named. And oops, wouldn't you guess it, one of the douchebags named everyone in the room. A bona fide gorefest ensues.

I'm not in the business of inherently trashing a movie because it has a very low budget, in fact I might be inclined to give it a little leeway in the visuals and acting departments if makes up for it in creativity. But you have got to go that extra mile, you have to show some vision or ingenuity or unique spirit. I will not tolerate long, awkwardly drawn out shots filled with empty space, a lack of action or unnatural pauses in the dialogue if you aren't serving up any other goodies. Home Sick serves up more than its fair share of entertaining gore, but little else. It is a tediously told story about unlikable characters, directed with little style or wit. I enjoyed some of the crazier scenes of grand guignol, but nothing in between those moments.

Home Sick's biggest problem is that it tries, very hard, to be funny. But it isn't. At all. Especially the final act, which has the surviving protagonists get the gun fever after obtaining weapons from a local gun nut. The director apparently asked everyone in the cast to turn it up to 11, with everyone hooting and hollering and running around like children. It's painful to watch a bunch of grownups embarrassing themselves so fully for something so unfunny.

Still, A + for the gore. Maybe next time the filmmakers can write an actual movie to go along with it.