Friday, September 17, 2010

In short: Home Sweet Home (1981)

It's Thanksgiving! Some nameless bodybuilding psycho (Jake Steinfeld, of "Body By Jake" notoriety) has broken out of the mental asylum. First thing he does is hunt himself a car, then he injects a bit of PCP into his tongue and leaves the Big City for greener pastures. While he's at it, he also has a good laugh and runs over an elderly woman.

Out in the country, the killer stalks and then slashes some people who might or might not be related to one another, and who throughout the film act as if they needed to be in a mental institution too. The end.

Oh well. There aren't too many Thanksgiving themed slashers, so I might as well put that down as one of the positives of Home Sweet Home, right next to Steinfeld's ridiculous performance that consists of loud laughter, gnashing of teeth and looking as if his face is going to explode any minute now.

The first forty minutes of the movie are full of the sort of random crap people who go for this sort of thing (aka me) are watching bottom of the barrel slasher movies like this for: there's a guy (possibly named Mistake!) who spends the whole film in mime make-up and chases the other characters around while playing mediocre rock licks on his electric guitar (amp on his back), an offensive Mexican stereotype girl who "sings" and plays the acoustic guitar who might have become Mistake's new girlfriend if not for the killer, some other guy (this film gets exactly as much precision out of me as it deserves) loses his head because Steinfeld jumps on the open hood of his car, and everyone else is either a semi-hot woman with an intensely weird looking boyfriend or said weird looking boyfriend. In other words, these forty minutes are a dreadful trial for anyone of taste and culture, and therefore pure gold for the friend of bizarre trash.

Unfortunately, after most of the cast has been killed off, director Nettie Pena decides that he/she wants to make a real suspenseful slasher movie. Obviously, given the non-talent of herself/himself and everyone else involved, boredom and long, badly lit scenes of nothing much ensue until two sleepwalking cops save the day.

Still, we will always have the pantomime guitarist from hell.

Addendum: friend of the blog Todd (of the always delightful Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!) has - through the power of professional research - found out that Nettie Pena a) is in fact a woman and b) is still working making environmental documentaries. Thanks Todd!

2 comments:

Todd said...

How could I not be intrigued by a name like Nettie Pena? He/she is indeed a she and is currently a director of environmental themed documentaries. If the IMDB is to be believed, her only other feature directing credit is for the 1979 porn horror spoof Dracula Sucks.

houseinrlyeh aka Denis said...

Excellent. That makes one feature film more than when I looked at her on IMDB. Perhaps, if we wait long enough, she'll grow a major back catalogue.