Previously posted on blog and written by B. Demeter
“House Hunting” (2013) leaves the viewer with the presumption that it is the house that is doing the hunting. Why? Fuck if I know. The movie focuses on two families that have been lured out to a remote open house. The Hays family is a father, daughter, and stepmother. The Thomson family is a mother, father, and asshole son. Once there, they cannot leave. The driveway loops them around to the front of the house. The woods around the house are seemingly endless. They also encounter a tongue-less girl running frantically through the woods. There are ghosts and the specter of the previous owner and his son. Those are the players and the premise… that’s about as interesting as it gets.
Boring story short, the previous owner’s wife was killed in a car accident, which caused the owner to go mad, kill his son, and then take his own life. The Hays father foreclosed on the house and the Thomson son killed the owner’s wife in a hit-and-run car accident. Boom, now you know.
This all plays out over the several weeks that they are trapped in the house. The house mysteriously provides the inhabitants with canned beef stew and firewood. Ghosts pop up from time to time. The Thompson mother hangs herself after being confronted by her deceased daughter. It’s all pretty useless.
Everyone kills everyone else and the last person standing is the Hays daughter. At the very end of the film we see two cars pull up the driveway. They replay the same scene that happened at the beginning of the movie and the ghost owner jumps up and cuts out her tongue, starting the whole process over again. Hope you’re not a fan of closure.
However, if you love people doing stupid things in horror movies you might find something to like about “House Hunting”. At one point, they discover the way to escape the house by walking backwards towards the street. The Hays daughter does it and gets close enough to hear traffic and people talking. The Thomson dad gets close enough to pick up the mail in the fucking mailbox. Once this is figured out everyone just keeps on farting around the house with their thumbs up their asses. It’s nonsensical.
Another thing- the tongue-less girl does nothing but looked scared. The assumption is that she is from the previous iteration of house trap process. The follow-up assumption is that she already figured out the walking backwards trick yet makes no attempt to convey this information to the Hay’s or Thomson’s. Sans tongue and scared senseless- she just bops along providing no insight to the plight of the players. Why has she given up on escaping so easily? Especially when she knows how to do it? Granted she can’t speak but is she also illiterate? Can she not put pen to paper and write out what she knows? It’s just stupid.
The movie plays out like a Twilight Zone episode… a bad Twilight Zone episode. Like one that if it came on during the New Year’s Eve marathon, you would switch over and watch Ryan Seacrest for that half-hour. What I especially don’t like about this movie is the weak plot. So the previous owner loses his wife, goes nuts, shoots his son and himself; which is terrible but worse shit happens in the world everyday. Why did this house become haunted? They don’t even try to explain it away with witchcraft, voodoo, or any other throwaway crazy mystical reason. The acting is decent, and the movie is shot well; but it isn’t enough to overcome this movie’s shortcomings. I wouldn’t watch this a second time and I’ve watched “Hold Your Breath” twice.
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