Review by Tristan Bishop
House Of Good And Evil, it seems, had an interesting production history, as none other than Clint Howard (brother of A-list director Ron Howard and the star of legendary video nasty Evilspeak) was originally slated to direct. Not only that, but veteran actor Tippi Hedren was going to star, pulling out for health reasons before filming began. It seems odd that such talent would be involved with such a small indie horror film, and after doing a little digging, the plot thickens a bit – apparently the film won several awards at film festivals, including The London International Film Festival 2013. After having watched the film (more on that to come) I found this slightly odd. It turns out that said festival DOES have a website, but there’s nothing on it. Suspicious. A cursory glance at IMDB forums reveals many spam accounts with names like ‘nzcvehhiea’ praising the film. Whether or not someone behind the scenes is telling fibs, this doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence.
The film, written and produced by Blu De Golyer and directed by David Mun, certainly grabs our attention with the opening scenes, with a woman being beaten (in shilouette), and then a woman (presumably the same one) miscarrying in a taxi. The woman is Maggie (Rachel Marie Lewis), and her firefighter husband Chris has bought them a house in the remote countryside, ostensibly so she can recover from her ordeal. Chris is away at work for long hours, and Maggie begins to hear ringing sounds from next door, which is all the stranger because Chris has told her there are no phonelines in the area. Maggie, in a weakened mental state, becomes obsessed by the sound and eventually breaks into her neighbour’s house, to find a dotty old lady (a fine performance from Marietta Marich) whose husband is also a firefighter. The women’s lives seem somehow intertwined, although all is maybe not as it seems. Is Maggie going mad? Is Chris hiding something? Will their fragile relationship survive?
I’ll be straight up about this. House Of Good And Evil is dull. It’s overlong (1 hour 50 mins), listlessly plotted, and is almost entirely devoid of anything remotely exciting until the last ten minutes or so. The film takes a massive gamble with stretching out a slight plotline over such length, especially with one location and, for the most part, one character, and it’s a gamble that fails miserably. There’s some potentially intriguing material here regarding abusive relationships, but it feels underexplored (despite the length!) Lewis starts off likeable enough, but a film with so much focus on a single character needs a great actor in that role – and her performance is nowhere near the brilliance of, say, Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965), which is a truly disturbing example of the ‘woman descends into madness’ film. The most annoying aspect of House Of Good and Evil, however, is the insistence on scary music rising up during sequences when nothing remotely troubling is happening – almost like it was added as a fix when the producers realised they had a horror film containing almost no scary moments whatsoever.
I’ve said before – it allows feels a bit uncharitable to slag off independent films, especially when they try and do things at least slightly differently, but after wading through all the misinformation posted online about this film I began to feel less and less charitable. Dishonest promotion or not though, this one really isn’t worth your time.
House of Good and Evil comes to Region 1 DVD on April 1st from Phase4 Films.