Home Sweet Home - Typtophan and PCP

Home Sweet Home
1981
Directed by Nettie Peña
Written by Thomas Bush
Starring  Jake Steinfeld, Vinessa Shaw & Peter De Paula

Color
Rated R - Approx. 85 Minutes

Taglines:
 - This year, it's not the turkey being carved for Thanksgiving

 - Be it ever so humble, there's no place to HIDE
 - The Bradleys Won't Be Leaving Home.  EVER.

Alternative Titles:
Slasher In The House - US Alternative Title
La nuit du saigneur (The Night of the Bloodletter) - France
Bloodparty - West Germany




"Oh wow!  My lucky day!  Two for the price of one!"
                                                                                  - Mistake

Not sure if this is supposed to be a tattoo...looks more like a nightclub stamp.

While Home Sweet Home is part of the 80's so called "Slasher Boom", it also belongs to a much more rare family of films:  Thanksgiving Horror.  A search on the internet will yield you about 8 results typically.  Sure there are films that you can watch that certainly lend themselves to the holiday.  It's long been tradition around these parts to watch Children of the Corn around this time of year.  Why?  I dunno....corn....harvesting....reminds us of Thanksgiving kinda.....totally getting off track here.  So, the point is that there are about 8 films that directly take place on or around Thanksgiving.

Mistake......doing what he does best.

Home Sweet Home tells the tale of an escaped mental patient (natch) who, after killing a man drinking beer in his station wagon and stealing it, runs down an old woman crossing the road and heads for the country.  As it just so happens, a group of friends (or family.....it's not really clear on that.  It's an odd group of people to be sure) is having Thanksgiving at a ranch out in the middle of nowhere.

After the psycho takes out the guy in the station wagon and the old lady crossing the street, it's about half an hour before the killings start up again.  You don't really notice too much of a lag though because it's rather amusing watching these strange characters interact.  By far the most intriguing is an odd guy they call Mistake.  Wearing white make up and perpetually playing his electric guitar through an amplifier backback, Mistake generally makes a nuisance of himself, but you can't help but like the kid.  After all, he does a pretty good magic routine halfway through the flick.

Just a normal Thanksgiving on the ranch......

For the most part, the kills are not very imaginative and the killer himself looks like Lou Ferrigno and Joe Piscapo had a love child (!).  The whole thing functions on this wonky, off-beat charm and I like that quite a bit.  I will say, however that the third act really lags in some places....but if you can get past that, all in all this is a fun little slasher flick that you can watch while chompin' on some homemade pumpkin pie!

0_o

Midnight Cinephile Tally

Death Toll - We got Nine deaths total here.  As mentioned before most of the killings aren't very imaginative, but there is a nifty electrocution and another dude gets crushed under the hood of a car.

Nude-O-Meter - We're on the low end of the meter tonight.  We get one quick glimpse of breasts.

Things That Go Bump In The Night - Once again, the human monster is on display.  A jacked up mental patient on PCP with one of the most annoying and out of place laughs I've heard in a long time.


Final Thoughts
The Thanksgiving Horror genre is an incredibly small one, so if you're looking for holiday themed scares you aren't going to have much of a selection.  However, I think this is a pretty good place to start.  Though it's got a respectable body count, the gore quotient is pretty low, so you won't have to worry about losing your turkey dinner while watching it.  The whole film has a strange, wonky vibe to it that I really dug.  This will definitely have a place in my November movie cycle from now on.

Final Rating
Three out of Five Pizza Rolls!