Home Sweet Home is one of those rare horror movies that you happen upon on Netflix that you can actually finish watching. I had stumbled upon this film, perhaps a year ago, and something reminded me of it recently. I decided to revisit it and see if it was as good as I had remembered.
Clocking in at a lean 1 hour and 20 minutes, this is an interesting take on everyone’s favorite; the home invasion film. A man wearing gloves, who is only filmed from the chin down, enters a well maintained home and begins to go through everything while the owners are out. He leaves only to return with a bag full of goodies; tools, weapons, a coverall to protect his clothing, Vaseline and a super creepy mask. What’s the Vaseline for? The unknown man spreads it over his hair and eyebrows; this is when you know that this guy is serious and seriously scary. He has thought of everything; even making sure not one single hair falls from his head.
The couple who live in the house return home from a date and go about their business unaware of the uninvited guest. Initially, the slow pace of the movie is good for building tension and then it becomes, well, slow. While I appreciate the wife’s intention to keep the marriage lively, it felt like a ploy to get our female lead into stockings and a cheerleader uniform.
The intruder keeps the couple separated and monitors them via baby monitors. See, that way they can hear each other being tortured. There is one particular scene where the wife pleads to see her husband and the killer walks very slowly away, takes a razor to the husband’s face and returns to show the scalp to the wife. Had I not already seen something like this in The Devil’s Rejects, I would have been impressed.
As the wife continues to evade the killer, the suspense slowly becomes not so suspenseful. Although, not completely shocked by the ending, I still enjoyed it; it was a solid idea. In fact, this movie is full of solid ideas that just never seem to grab you the way the filmmaker had intended. Much like The Purge, this could have been a truly unsettling home invasion experience, but it just seemed to lose it’s way. Unfortunately, on a second viewing, I was underwhelmed by Home Sweet Home.
