These Movies are Terrible: Home Sweet Home and Insidious 2

Home Sweet Home (2013)
What a terrible movie. The home invasion resurgence I’m seeing is bad enough on it’s own, but where other movies might try something a little bit different, this one is happy to be the usual shitty tripe. There is no Wikipedia page and the synopsis on IMDB is one line long, so I’ll have to wing it. A couple is spending a night at home when they realize some dude wearing that mask from Saw has broken into their home and also trapped them inside. That’s really about it and from here on, expect major spoilers.

Of course, the husband immediately gets his, leaving the wife to play the cat and mouse game with the killer. Of course right before that, she thought she’d surprise her husband with some sexy times while wearing a cheerleader uniform, so naturally the killer hunts her around the house with her dressed as a slightly aged cheerleader. She gets captured, escapes, gets captured again and so on.

A lot of dumb shit takes place, she makes choices that make no sense, her husband is completely useless and gets fucked up constantly and then in the end we have the usual fake-out death. The killer then stops messing around and murders the poor woman and then the plot twist hits. Turns out he was a police officer and under the painter’s onesie he’s wearing is a full cop getup. He stages the scene to make it look like he was called to the house and the credits roll.

I’m not sure how he’s going to explain that he got shot with the victim’s gun or where exactly he was earlier and why he’s at their house when no call has been made. Does this guy even have a shift? Or is he more like a freelance cop that works on the weekends? I don’t know. I’m sure you can plug these plot holes with some mental gymnastics, I’m vaguely aware that there was a whole thing where the couple had called the police the previous day about a prowler, but really, it’s too dumb to think about.

There is really nothing interesting about this movie.

1 out of 5 home invaders.

Insidious 2 (2013)

I honestly didn’t love the first insidious and I could never understand why people talk it up. It felt like one of those movies that you’d only think are interesting if you watch maybe a couple of horror movies a year. To me, it had a bunch of ideas I’ve seen before, but at least it was competently made, so I wasn’t completely disappointment. I’m even planning a re-watch.

I went into the sequel/prequel with good intentions, but ultimately, it was pretty bad. Again, Wikipedia fails me for a synopsis.

The movie takes place almost immediately after the end of the first one. The family moves to another house and tries to get things back to normal. But weird shit still happens, this time apparently centering around her husband and the baby.

Spoilers ahead.

The movie serves as both a prequel and a sequel to the original movie. We get a flashback showing how the father of the family also had a run in with the demons/ghosts/whatevers when he was a kid and managed to suppress his astral projecting abilities. Everything that takes place in the flashbacks is really well done and all around interesting. The problem lies with all the shit they add to the current timeline, which ends up coming off like a an episode of Supernatural mixed with American Horror Story season one. They throw in some ghosts, an overbearing, crazy mom, a cross-dressing serial killer that appears both as his innocent child self and his later, murderous incarnation and somehow try and tie all this in to the events of the first movie. It fell flat for me, though your mileage may vary.

I kept waiting for something to happen that would tie it up nicely, but it never came. It really is as disjointed as it looked to be. The bit of mindfuck where the events in the flashback are a reaction to the events of the future (you’ll know it when you see it, the movie makes sure to hit you over the head with it) was really the only interesting part of the movie.

The movie isn’t shy about showing us a bunch of ghosts in broad daylight (always accompanied by the usual piano and string cues), which gets ridiculous pretty fast. There is only a handful of effective scares and none of them are really that original or interesting. It’s a very formulaic offering, overall.

It’s probably not completely terrible, but nowhere near as good as the original, which wasn’t that good to begin with, so eh.

2 out of 5 ghosts.