Review: The House With 100 Eyes (2013)

house-with-100-eyesBy Jamie Brownlie

Dear God, Ben. What are you doing to me? My second review for the site and not only do you give me a found footage movie but found footage torture porn?

As I said above, this is the second movie review I’ve written for the fine folks at Brutal as Hell and the second I’ve written in the five years since I closed down my old site, BthroughZ. In that time I’e watched countless horror movies with the option of shutting them off when I got to the point of gouging my eyes out. Sadly, when you’re reviewing a movie you’ve got to watch the whole damn thing, no matter how shit stained it might be. When I wrote my aforementioned first review I tried to stay professional because it was my first time writing for the site and I wanted to give a good first impression. As my mother used to say, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” Well, that’s over and done with so here comes the real me.

First things first: Fuck this movie, fuck the people who made this movie and fuck anyone who likes this movie. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about this turd.

Ed and Susan (Jim Roof and Shannon Malone, respectively) are your standard suburban couple. Your standard suburban couple who happen to run a snuff film business. If that wasn’t enough, Ed has the lofty goal of making the very first ‘triple feature’ snuff film, a snuff film with three murders. If you’re going to go, go big, I guess. This film is the documentation of that endeavor.

Seeing as I write for a site called Brutal as Hell, it should come as no shock to anyone that I love violent, fucked-up movies. I love movies where guys get stabbed in the eye with icicles, movies where men carrying push lawnmowers wade into rooms full of zombies, and movies where masked, unstoppable maniacs slaughter scantily clad co-eds with power tools and lawn care implements. What I don’t love is torture porn. Yes, I liked the first Saw movie and I love the Collector/Collection series, but movies that exist for no purpose other than to show and glorify the prolonged suffering and degradation of my fellow man, I just don’t get and I’ll never understand the mindset of those who call themselves fans of the genre.

– Spoilers Abound (because, fuck this movie) –

Ed and Susan are driven, I’ll give them that. Under the guise of amateur porn makers, they troll the streets of their city looking for attractive young boys and girls they can film having a threesome and then slaughter. However, when regular teens turn out to be too smart to fall for their nefarious scheme, they turn to those far more desperate, homeless kids. Enter Crystal, Clutch and Jamie, three young squat dwellers willing to do anything to make enough money to get off the street. Promised $500 each, they return to Ed and Susan’s cage, as he refers to it at the beginning of the movie, to make Ed’s opus of depravity. Unsurprisingly, things don’t go to plan as Crystal decides she can’t fuck on film, Clutch experiences some erectile issues and Susan’s addiction to poisoning random people all get in the way. This all might sound sort of humorous, and at points early in the film some things are played for laughs, but it’s not. It’s all been done before and, honestly, it’s all rather boring.

As much as I hate to say it, technically, the film is actually fairly well done. Since it’s found footage, it’s obviously shot on video (not that everything today isn’t). That said, it’s well shot on video. Everything looks great. The gore is (sadly) realistic and done well enough to make this desensitized horror hound morally uncomfortable. Likewise, the acting is adequately performed by all those involved, particularly the unfortunate Crystal as she’s dismembered, disemboweled and force fed her own body fat. The sound is not the best and at times seems like it was patterned after the Max Headroom signal intrusion.* Truthfully, aside from the one of two sound issues, from a technical and performance standpoint, the film is better than most of its ilk.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just a bad audience for this kind of film. Personally, if I was watching it for my own entertainment and not to review, I’d have shut it off 15 minutes in. It’s not that I can’t stomach movies like this; I’ve sat through both Cannibal Holocaust and August Underground, two films that dwarf this in terms of torture, depravity and realism. It’s just that I’ve seen it all before and I don’t need to see it again.

For all of its shocking themes it fails to deliver at strange moments. The nudity of the porn shoot, of which there is very little, is blurred as if they were afraid to show it. They feature a scene in which Ed masturbates to DVDs of his past kills but once more they blur it out. Not that I wanted to see Ed ‘yanky his wanky’ but for a film that seems to pride itself on its extremeness (if that’s actually a word) those scenes seem like a cop out. If you’re going to try to show how depraved a guy is by showing a full frontal view of him jacking off to murder scenes, don’t blur it. Shoot it from the side, shoot it from behind, just don’t puss out at the last second and blur it. Another case in point: they show Crystal’s stomach being slit open in close-up, but then show Ed hammering on her arm with a mallet in a less shocking or ‘artsy’ style. Maybe they were trying to show how fancy they were, but after just seeing poor Crystal force fed her own guts in ultra-realism, it seemed an odd choice.

Besides the technical competency of the film and those that made it, there’s not much I can recommend about it. So yeah, fuck this movie, fuck the people who made this movie and fuck anyone who likes this it.

Oh, and Ben, if you the next movie you send me could have some scantily clad co-eds or maybe the words massacre, sleepover or cheerleader in the title, that would be awesome. Thanks.

* For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, follow this link.

The House With 100 Eyes is available on Region 1 DVD from 16th June 2015 (pre-orders open now), from Artsploitation Films.

THE HOUSE WITH 100 EYES | Official Trailer | Artsploitation Films from artsploitation on Vimeo.