Table of Contents
Welcome back for another daily horror digest! Today’s movie of the day is one of the more difficult ones to rate for me since I had such an odd experience with it. Read about it below, and keep reading for some news and trivia, including one of my favorite Japanese movies of all time that was released on this day 48 years ago!
Movie of the Day
Today’s movie is a weird one. Weird in the sense that it’s not a very good movie, and I wasn’t really into it for a long time, but the finale brought me back around. It caused me to re-evaluate what I did and didn’t like, and I’m still considering everything. But I’m not thinking about it because it’s deep and layered. Not at all. In fact, the movie is extremely shallow, but that ends up being a positive. Sort of. Okay, enough putting it off. Today’s movie of the day is The Home.
The Home stars Pete Davidson as Max, a guy with personal issues stemming from the death of his foster brother when he was younger. Max gets into trouble for vandalizing a building, and his prior record means he’s probably going to serve jail time. But instead, Max’s foster father pulls some strings and gets his sentence reduced to community service. Max is now the Super (aka the janitor) at Green Meadows retirement home. Max starts making friends with a couple of the residents, but he soon starts to realize that something sinister is going on upstairs on the fourth floor. As he investigates, he starts pulling at the strings of a horrifying conspiracy.
About 70-80% of the movie is focused on Max’s search for answers after he repeatedly hears screams from the fourth floor and discovers something disturbing there when he sneaks in (it’s locked and off-limits). It starts off interesting enough, but as it progresses the mystery becomes more and more ridiculous. Certain things don’t make much sense, to the point that I wasn’t sure if some of them were intentional clues or mistakes made by the filmmakers. Then the big reveal happens, and it felt pretty cheap in the moment. It’s more of a rug pull than a reveal.
But then something happened. There’s a moment when the movie could have conceivably ended, but it doesn’t. The story continued, and I began to see where it was going. And I liked it. Then what I thought might happen did happen, and I kind of loved it. I know this is all very vague because I want to avoid spoilers, but the point I’m trying to make is that I lost faith in the movie, then it brought me back in a big way. Bigger than I thought it could. Big enough that it made me rethink what I was feeling about the story earlier. I think if I watch The Home again with a different frame of mind, I’ll enjoy it a lot more.
To try to give a sense of how I think the movie is best enjoyed (by me, anyway), I’ll say that the movie is very dumb. Its big, dumb, fun ending is the highlight of a movie that, in the end, invites you to embrace B-movie nonsense. I love B-movie nonsense (not that all B-movies are nonsense, but just that nonsensical B-movies can be entertaining). That’s not what I expected when I sat down in the theater and the movie started, and that’s a big reason why I didn’t dig the movie until much, much later when I changed my frame of mind.
That said, the movie still isn’t great from a technical standpoint. It feels like the movie was shot using a first draft of the script. The basic plot is there, but the connections between point A and point B sometimes don’t make much realistic sense. Jumps in logic and plot contrivances abound (though most, but not all, of it makes sense in the end). Also, everything the viewer needs to know is delivered in a perfunctory, functional way rather than an emotional one. Information is conveyed simply and explicitly through dry dialogue, and the movie is very heavy-handed with its explanations a lot of the time. There’s so much plot happening that emotional beats get lost along the way. But that silly, over-the-top ending made me not care so much about any emotion except the fun I was having.
Star Rating: 3 out of 5 (pretty good)
Three out of five seems high when I type it out, but when judging The Home against other movies I’ve rated 3, it’s right there with them. However, I know many people probably won’t be as into The Home as I ended up being. I’d recommend this movie for fans who are okay with not taking things too seriously, and those who can enjoy some nonsense with a fun ending. Just don’t think too hard about it. If you can do that, you should be fine.
In the News
- Jason Blum gave details about the Five Nights at Freddy’s experience coming Halloween Horror Nights in Universal Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood later this year. Guests will encounter “full-scale replicas” of Freddy Fazbear, Chica, Bonnie, Foxy, and Mr. Cupcake as they find their way through rooms based on the 2023 film. (The Hollywood Reporter)
- Halloween Horror Nights will also include a house based on The Wyatt Sicks from WWE. Guests in the maze will be stalked by The Fiend as they walk through domains themed for Uncle Howdy, Ramblin’ Rabbit, Mercy the Buzzard, Abby the Witch, and Huskus the Pig Boy. (The Hollywood Reporter)
- The trailer for the upcoming psychological horror film Lilly Loves Alone was released yesterday. Here’s the official synopsis from the YouTube post: “Ten years after her daughter’s tragic death, Lilly’s world is tearing apart. The traumatic ghosts of her past are waking up and tonight she must face the depths of her manic madness and a haunting she won’t soon forget.”
- Hope, the next film from Na Hong-Jin, the director of The Wailing, is expected to be released in the summer of 2026. (Bloody Disgusting)
Birthdays
Laurence Fishburne was born on July 30th, 1961. Laurence is one of the great modern actors, and his career is stacked with memorable roles. In horror, his best roles are as the Westin Hills Hospital orderly Max in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), and as Captain Miller in Event Horizon (1997).
Also born today, in 1999, is Joey King. Her first horror movie was Quarantine (2008) in which she played the girl Briana whose dog is initially thought to be the source of the infection spread throughout the apartment building. Joey has appeared in a few more horror films, including The Conjuring (2013) and Slender Man (2018).
Famed blues musician Buddy Guy was born on July 30th, 1936. His appearance in Sinners is one of many amazing highlights in that film.
Events on This Day
On July 30th, 1977, House was released in Japanese theaters. The studio behind this amazing film, Toho, didn’t believe that it would do well with audiences. Regardless, it proved to be popular with a younger crowd who propelled it to financial success. Despite this, House wouldn’t see a release in the United States until about three decades later.
The Blair Witch Project expanded to a wide theatrical release in the United States on July 30th, 1999. Filming took place in Maryland over the course of eight days. The three stars all recorded the footage themselves, and their actions were improvised based on instructions given to them through messages left by the directors. Few, if any, found footage movies since then have gone to the same lengths to ensure authenticity.
On July 30th, 2020, the screenlife movie Host was released digitally on Shudder in the United States. At a lean 56 minutes, Host became a minor sensation by coming out during the pandemic and echoing people’s feelings of fear and isolation.
Thank you once again for joining me on another daily digest. See you tomorrow!
