What The House Of The Devil Does Wrong.


The House Of The Devil is an homage film. Specifically, an homage horror film. The horror genre is a niche genre. Sure, everybody watches horror films, but horror fans are the sort that will religiously watch almost any horror film that is released. This makes for many difficult sessions - especially since most horror films end up on the bottom shelf as distribution funds are limited unless you're a Saw film or Paranormal Activity - and the quality is often hard to gauge. Reviews do help, but at times a film sits on the fence of whether a film is great or shit. Last year the film Grace was received with as many cheers as it got hisses. This year is The House Of The Devil.


Where Grace was a low budget shlock fest - and a terrible one at that - The House Of The Devil is an old style horror film. Gore is to a minimum, loud noises and jumps are also to a minimum; what is not to a minimum is bad pizza, sleeping, dancing around and knocking vases down and numbing quiet periods of pure nothing. 


The House Of The Devil starts interestingly enough, but when you get to the fifteen minute mark and the most tension you've got is that the pizza is just terrible, you know you're already in trouble. Tom Noonan appears about twenty minutes into the film and provides the most chills for the film - Tom Noonan could read a shopping list and you'd be terrified. So it is detrimental to the film when his character leaves and we're left with the adequate Jocelin Donahue to wander around the house where she is to babysit the absent mother of Tom Noonan. 


She drinks some water. The sink makes an odd noise. She wanders around the house and rudely looks in every room - you're asked to babysit and just asked to sit and watch TV and order a pizza, just do what you're told! She orders a pizza. She dances around to 80's music. She breaks a vase - shock! - and cleans it up. Dances around some more. Watches TV. Turns off the TV. The pizza arrives. 


The pizza man tells her it will be 30 minutes for arrival, and for fillers sake the audience is forced to sit through the 30 minutes that it takes for the pizza to arrive. There are no moments of fright or tension, just waiting and waiting. Why? The film smartly opened with a fact about Satanic cults in the US in the 70's and 80's and after a brief moment of gore in a cemetary about thirty minutes in you wonder what the film actually has to do with Satanic cults at all. 


This is The House Of The Devil's major fault, there is no real tension and no element of fear because there is no plot provided. For eighty minutes of the ninety minute running time of The House Of The Devil the plot goes as follows: girl needs money for house to rent, girl finds job that will pay money for rent, girl and friend of girl go to house to babysit, friend of girl who is more interesting than girl is conveniently killed in House By The Cemetary style, girl faffs about for about forty minutes, girl eats a spiked pizza and wakes up in the Satanic cult section of the film. If Satanic cults scare you, just watch the last ten minutes of the film. 


Essentially The House Of The Devil is all slow burn tension-less build up to a finale which does not make sense whatsoever. It appears that there is a set up to a sequel, but I really am not so sure about that because I honestly have no idea what happened in the final minutes of the film. I did watch it, but it just did not make any sense. When a film like Paranormal Activity was bland but had some effective jumps, it at least felt like a throwback to films from the 80's and it wasn't even trying. The House Of The Devil puts so much effort into the look and style and film stock of the 80's that it fails to maintain an interesting story to hang interesting scares on. 


I honestly don't know how anybody who watches The House Of The Devil could find it scary or that it works as an effective horror film. I have read many positive reviews for the film and all they have done is describe a film which sounds a million times better than the one we're presented with. 


Two haunted houses out of five.

What The A Team Does Right.

The A Team is a film that really shouldn't be as good as it is. If it were a terrible film it could easily be classed as a guilty pleasure, but fortunately enough it is not. What The A Team is is immensely enjoyable and surprisingly deals with how unintelligent the source material really is. 

The basic plot of The A Team is your typical group of men on a mission to find a MacGuffin (in this case some US money printing plates). When you strip the plot of The A Team down to its basic elements, it really should not work. Moving The A Team to Afghanistan? Really? 

But surprisingly it does work. Where The A Team begins is its first right move - the obligatory origin story. Whilst film going audiences are constantly given a barrage of new origin stories to deal with, The A Team updates itself for modern audiences with a snappy and enjoyable opening fifteen minutes. Whilst it's not uncommon for a pre-credits sequence to introduce or remind viewers where the characters have been, the pre-credits sequence of The A Team needs to be implemented more often for audiences (especially for the Spider-Man update that is sadly still going ahead). 

The first fifteen minutes introduce The A Team and instead of having the line producer or sound designer credits shown during scenes where there is dialogue or close up shots, these credits are delegated to the shots in between scenes where there are establishing shots or wide shots. Now this doesn't sound like much, but in execution it creates a less intrusive and more comfortable introduction to the film. It makes you feel as if there wasn't even a pre-credits sequence at all - and even the directors name Joe Carnahan is left to the sidelines for an aerial shot. The when The A Team are all together the title is slammed onto the screen and the film starts true and proper. 

Anybody coming into this film without knowing that this was an adaptation of an 80's TV series would still feel as if they knew the characters and could enjoy the film without prior knowledge of the characters - something which TV show to film adaptations sadly lack a little bit too much of lately. 

The next thing that The A Team does so correctly is knows how to have fun. The preview for the film showed you the most insane moment - a parachuting tank - and told you on the tin that this film was not to be taken seriously. The casting of Sharlto Copley is pure genius - an almost unknown actor, Copley is the fun that the film requires and the film lives and breathes on his comedic timing. Sadly he does go AWOL come the films over the top finale, but the fact that the rest of the cast are so obviously having fun that they carry the loss of Copley for the final twenty minutes. 

Big budget films require an obligatory love story and the casting of Jessica Biel is at first off putting, but relegating her to short one minute scenes makes her bearable and surprisingly enjoyable. We could have done without the flashbacks to earlier scenes from the film - it's only 100 minutes long, we have been paying attention and don't need reminding of whats going on - but fortunately they're over soon enough.

Amongst the insane action sequences - mostly with added CGI which for once does not look fake or out of place - there is great chemistry between the cast - Liam Neeson in a role which he relishes playing and no doubt given the timing of filming The A Team he needed a role like this; Bradley Cooper is the most enjoyable version of "Bradley Cooper" yet; Quinton Jackson is great as B.A. Baracus.  

Finally, the humour is perfect. The A Team is gloriously funny. A well timed - and extremely well executed - joke on the pathetic quality of 3D is the highlight. The action is understandable - you can see who is shooting or punching who and it is obvious as to what is happening. Once the ending comes around and the obligatory sequel set up - I really do hope there is a sequel - you can't help smiling at the surprise cameo and feel a hell of a lot better for having seen The A Team. In a year where there has not been enough big films to warrant actually leaving the house and spending $17 on a movie ticket, The A Team comes along as a breath of fresh air with a heavy dose of masculinity. 

Four Crazy South African Pilots Out Of Five.