OPEN HOUSE

Open House

"Someone has taken their hatred of real estate agents one step too far..."


That could have been the tag line for OPEN HOUSE, a 1988 slasher film from the wonderfully named director Jag Mundhra, a movie which does everything rather well up to a point then just collapses into unintentional hilarity. Usually when you critique a slasher film, you find yourself having to drop your standards of acceptability, otherwise most would never measure up. Most of these films were shot with very little money. That means they usually look a bit flat and dull. The lack of money also leads to the casting of relatively inexperienced actors, usually on par with high school drama students, who can deliver their lines but not in a way that is either believable or effective. The scripts tend to be written with budgetary constraints in mind as well, hence all the slasher films set in isolated settings, a tactic which may work narratively well but is generally done to limit the number of exteriors that need to be filmed.


Open House

Interestingly enough, there are a few slasher films that dare you to keep those levels of acceptability high - HALLOWEEN is a good example. They're rare, but they are out there. OPEN HOUSE is one of them. Now no one watching this film is going to be blown away by the look of the film. It's pretty dull and uncomplicated, but that's not where OPEN HOUSE feels it has a chance. It's the story. Clearly, Mundhra and his screenwriter David M. Evans feel they have a good script. I'm not sure I agree with them, but it does have it's merits.


Open House

Right. The story. The film centers on a man called Dave Kelley. Dave is a psychologist hosting a self-help call-in radio program in Los Angeles. One day he receives a phone call from a man calling himself Harry. Harry has a few things to say about the recent spate of murders that have been occurring in LA. All of the victims have been young, female real estate agents. Harry says they deserved it. Dave writes him off as a nut but as more bodies are discovered, he begins to think Harry may have something to do with it. All of this is compounded by the fact that Dave's girlfriend, a woman named Lisa, owns a very lucrative real estate business. Is she in danger? Does the murder have something to do with the live on-air suicide of a young woman on Dave's show? Could the murderer be Resnick, a sleazy little greaseball intent on ruining Lisa's business? Teaming up with a hard-nosed detective named Shapiro, Dave sets out to catch the killer before he kills again.


Open House

Nothing too original here. Aside from the strange angle of having a killer targeting beautiful, busty real estate agents, there would be little to separate this film from virtually any other urban-set slasher film. The difference here is that everyone is playing really straight with the material. There are no knowing "wink wink" moments, no in-jokes or overtly modernist touches. It's played as a deadly serious thriller. All the actors turn in perfectly fine performances - including B-movie queen Tiffany Bolling and 80's porn star legend Robert Bullock in cameos - and Mundhra directs the film with all the intensity he can muster with peanuts for a budget. He doesn't always succeed unfortunately. The stalk and slash elements are strangely enough the weakest elements in the whole film. The ending is anti-climatic to the extreme with some of the worst socially conscious dialogue ever written. The attempt to create a work of social significance is obvious but the execution is botched. That's disappointing as the film up until that point was rather enjoyable.


Open House

This was a strange film to watch. It's certainly better than it had any right to be and that, to be perfectly honest, threw me for a loop. I was expecting a poorly acted, overly gory mess. What I got was a - relatively speaking - well-acted film with very, very little in the way of splatter. The kill scenes are all short, the nudity isn't as frequent as you'd expect, but the story just moved along so quickly and so well that I actually found myself quite caught up in it. The presence of some familiar faces - Joseph Bottoms, Rudy Ramos, Adrienne Barbeau, and the always enjoyable Robert Miano - helped as well.


All in all, the film has it's share of flaws, but I really think it's one of the best slasher films released in the late 80s. It's not going to stand alongside HALLOWEEN or BLACK CHRISTMAS, but it really has a personality all it's own, much better than the scores of cheap-o knock-offs that came before it. If you can forgive the film for falling apart in the last 10 minutes, I think you'd come away as impressed as I was. Not groundbreaking or earth-shattering. Just a solid 90 minutes of entertainment.


Recommended.