Movie Review: Housesitters (2018)
Housesitters is the feature-length directorial debut from Jason Coffman. It’s also written by Coffman, along with help from Jamie Jirak, and Annie Watkins.
At its core, Housesitters is about a girl who gets a housesitting job has a friend drop by with a box of porn and then has some dudes come over to hang out and have some fun. Their party has a temporary setback because of some evil shenanigans having to do with a warlock, demon portal, and a cute (but deadly) Hexaglion Familiar.
What we liked:
– This film has a lot of charm. It has some pretty good moments of humor and references to some older horror films.
– The characters all have likable personalities. A lot of indie horror films, or even just indie films suffer sometimes because the characters just don’t have personality. Even though a bit silly, it works for the style of this film.
– The “Dreamland Home Video” intro and the “Tomorrow Romance Productions” intro were a nice throwback to the 80’s style of videos. It was a pretty decent concept for a horror film that isn’t necessarily new, but also not done much. The idea was unique in the way it was executed, and in a fun way.
– The little Hexaglion Familiar was just the cutest killing machine.
– The intermission ad for the “Tomorrow Romance Productions (Kids)” movie Dancing About Barkitecture was one of the best things we have ever seen, and also one of the most “wtf did I just watch” things at the same time.
What we thought could have been better:
The only thing we thought we would have liked to see was more of the horror element. There was a good premise set up, and a good backstory that was elaborated on, but not much actual horror aside from a couple of scenes. We understand that it was meant to be more comedy/horror, and that indie films also have to work within their limitations as well, which may have been the case here.
Overall:
Housesitters is not your run-of-the-mill horror film. It’s also not your average indie film or your typical film at all, but it’s fun and it works. And it works well for what they were trying to accomplish within an indie budget. While it is a bit light on the horror side of things for our tastes, we would still recommend this to any indie horror fan and we hope to see a sequel (and more Dancing About Barkitecture please).
Housesitters debuts tomorrow, April 28th 2018 at the Windy City Horrorama Film Festival, at the Davis Theater in Chicago, IL. If you are in the area, you should definitely stop in and check this out!
For more info check out https://www.windycityhorrorama.com/ Follow Housesitters here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Housesitters666 and here on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HousesittersMovie
