Home Sweet Home

This is one of two movies with the same name. Hopefully the other one is better than this. This crap is the first English film for French director David Morlet. Sound familiar? He also directed the French zombie movie Mutants, which I thought was awesome.  When I heard this was his latest effort, I'll admit that I was pretty excited. Mutants was such a strong movie in plot and acting that I mistakenly thought the same would be said for Home Sweet Home. I don't know what went wrong, and how it could be possible for something to piss away any potential in a matter of minutes.

We start the film with a masked intruder invading the home of a married couple that is out on a date night. He drinks milk, eats their food, goes through their photos, and sniffs the wife's underwear before hiding until they return. Once they arrive home, we're subjected to 30 minutes of meaningless conversation. Nothing happens until the 45-50 minute mark, then the remaining time is the wife trying to escape and she ends up dying anyway. And the masked intruder? A local police officer that gets his rocks off by torturing and murdering random town residents. Why? Because screw you, this is only 80 minutes long and there's blood and gore. You're not supposed to pay attention to the plot.

I just can't believe an officer in a very small town could get away with murders of that scale. You're also led to believe this happened more than once. The guy has one huge duffel bag filled with booby traps, a sword, guns, knives, and things that any normal person would question why a cop would be roaming around with stuff like that. Apparently he also scoped out any potential victims by stalking their homes. In this case, he's spotted by the wife who calls the police. Somehow all calls from her house get routed to his cell phone. Every. Single. Time. I don't know much about law enforcement, but why would emergency calls be going to someone's personal cell phone? Did I miss something?

In order for such events to happen, the police department would have to be oblivious. But with today's technology, I imagine it is damn near impossible to commit such crimes without someone saying something. Then there's the married couple. I understand putting a lock on a gun for safety, but why the hell would you only have one key that's down in the basement? And then even after you have the gun, you hesitate is shooting the killer. He then chops off your hand with a sword and stabs you in the heart.

I'm willing to overlook a lot of things when it comes to movies. But when things would only happen if people were that damn stupid? I can't do it. Anyone's survival instincts would completely take over. If that means you have to shoot the bastard 5 times and once in the head for good measure to insure you will live, then dammit that's what you're going to do. And let's not forget the fact this psycho murdered your spouse by scalping him. I don't know about you, but if I had the option to take out whoever killed my husband, that dude would have more holes in him than a pincushion.

This gets a 0. While I understand the writer was trying to show some kind of humanity on the wife's part by not going for a kill shot, it comes off as stupidity and weakness which leads to her death. I refuse to believe such a situation could happen even in the dumbest of circumstances. When faced with death, most of us won't go down without one hell of a fight. Home Sweet Home basically says otherwise, and takes too much time to do so. This falls into the category of home invasion movies, but I'm so sick of seeing these things everywhere that I can't recommend a good one right now.

However, if you want to see highly unlikely circumstances that lead to outrageous results, check out Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. At least in that one the sheer stupidity makes sense.