Film Reviews by ER

Along with the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), this was one of the few films that genuinely disturbed me on first watching on video in the early 80s. True, I was only 12 or so, but most horror films (which I loved, and still do) just sort of came and went. This one really freaked me out.

House is possibly the first example of "torture porn" in cinema. As the other reviewer has said, there's little if any artistic merit in it... it's not particularly well made, and the weird comedy elements really don't work. It's meant to shock.

But it does have that horribly real grainy quality of TCSM, and while I would never want to watch something like A Serbian Story on principle, I reluctantly find myself revisiting this every few years just to see if it still affects me. It does, and that in itself says something about the film's power.

This is a deeply strange film. Not in a David Lynch kind of way, where events happen like a dream but with a weird logic, or in a traditionally horror movie way, where you can see the scares coming but still relish them.

It's something else entirely. Granted, a big portion of the film is essentially an extended rehash - though an inventive one - of a particular scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; if you're a fan of that, you'll be ticking off your bingo card as the references unfold. But just when you think you know where it's going... you really don't.

Having just watched it I'm not sure the film really earns its elegiac score and grand finale, but at the very least, it's certainly original. The fact that (as other people have pointed out) it concerns an all-American family but was actually shot in Yorkshire featuring an all-English cast only adds to the weirdness. To the filmmakers' benefit, you really wouldn't know that unless you recognise some of the cast.

So yeah, hard to put a rating on it. Better just watch and make your own mind up!