House Hunting

Hidden Gem
I rent a fair amount of low budget suspense/thriller/horror type movies from Redbox or am scrounging around on Netflix looking for these type of films. Often, I discover movies that are so terrible that I rarely make it through the first thirty minutes to an hour before I turn them off. So, it is always a pleasant surprise to find a film that I will watch all the way through and it is even a bigger surprise when I enjoy the film after completing it. So, I will place my rating within that context. This movie was an absolute hidden diamond on Netflix. A fair amount of the film had a House of Leaves feel in that there is a house where all sorts of strange things happen and the visitors cannot leave. In a nutshell, this film is about two families viewing a home for sale and become trapped in the home by some strange supernatural means. What occurs throughout the rest of the film is the interactions between the characters and their attempt to escape the house and strange things...

Quiet horror done just right!
I'm a horror novelist as well as a huge fan of horror movies but at times I get a little tired of the low budget splatter fests and torture porn films that are so common these days. When I sat down to watch HOUSE HUNTING I honestly didn't know what to expect but was soon pleasantly surprised. For me, this is low budget horror done right. It's has a great plot, excellent acting, wonderful drawn out suspense, and it's creepy as hell to boot. I kept waiting for it to let me down but I enjoyed this movie all the way through. In fact, it gets stronger as it goes on and I absolutely loved the ending. House hunting isn't perfect of course, but if you are searching for something a little different, and prefer quiet horror to bucket loads of blood, I think you'll really enjoy this film. Highly recommended.

Gord Rollo
[...]

ALL ROADS LEAD TO HOME
Two families go look at a house. Charlie (Marc Singer) a banker, is there with his new wife Susan (Hayley DuMond) and teen daughter Emmy (Janey Gioiosa). Emmy of course, doesn't get along with her step mom. The second family is a bit more down to earth. Don (Art LaFleur) and Leslie (Victoria Vance) have a son Jason (Paul McGill) about Emmy's age. He has one leg in a brace, but his other two legs are working fine.

As you can tell by the trailer or write up, the home doesn't let them go. As it turns out they all have their dirty little secrets which come back to haunt them. The film develops slowly as you are unsure what is happening. Are they already dead? Is this a descent into madness (aka "Yellow Brick Road") or just a simple haunting? Or combination?

The problem is that they put too much into the film that when it came time to bring it home, sort of speak, that boredom started setting it. They needed to make the important end scenes as mysterious as the rest...

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