The House of the Devil

In my review for Ti West's The Innkeepers (the next movie he'd do), I noted how he loves the ultra-slow burn, and how The Innkeepers may have been bogged down by too slow a burn with too few developments along the way to keep viewers hooked. This movie shows he was at least growing with The Innkeepers, because this redefines the concept of a slow burn. This is a no-burn horror movie. And it's a damned shame, because there is so much to like here that's in service of a movie that makes tectonic plate movement look like Usain Bolt. The movie is an homage to the occult horror movies of the late 70's and 80's like The Omen. It uses graphics, camerawork, and pacing that are ripped right out of that era, and the movie is set in the era to match. If nothing else, Ti West deserves credit for knowing how to ape a style without it feeling campy or patronizing. If this was on a double-bill at a drive-in with The Omen or The Beyond, the only thing that would give it away as not being of the time would be the gore ... and even then, the 70's gave us The Wizard Of Gore and the entire grindhouse subgenre, so maybe not even then. But any positive to be found is murdered in cold blood by the movie's miserable pacing. Ostensibly about a college girl who takes a babysitting job at a weird house and things go haywire, the babysitting job doesn't start until almost 45 minutes into this 90 minute movie. Yes, half of the movie is set-up. It's one thing to world-build, but another thing to make half your movie a prologue. That leaves very little time to build tension, and the movie uses almost NONE of it to do so. Our lead character wanders around the house ... checks out almost every room ... watches TV for 30 seconds and turns it off ... dances with her headphones on and knocks over a vase ... it's here that she discovers something suspicious (a picture in a closet of the car that was in the driveway, with people other than the ones she's babysitting for standing in front of the car) ... so she runs downstairs and gets a knife, only to talk herself out of being scared not too long thereafter. The movie confuses the lack of action covered up by spooky music to be tension. It's enough to drive you nuts, if you don't spend the next 30 minutes yawning. And then, with less than 15 minutes to go, the movie goes from quilting-circle dull to SATANIC WORSHIP CEREMONY in the blink of an eye. Literally, from one scene to another, it slams on the gas full throttle, and it is JARRING. The last 15 minutes are a flurry of bloodshed and insanity, and it feels like a whole different movie got stapled onto what preceded it. It's nice that the movie has energy, but at no point does it earn that energy. Imagine if Die Hard was 80 minutes of the Christmas party, two random scenes of the terrorists pulling up and entering the building, and then the last ten minutes was John McClane going John Wick on Hans Gruber's entire team. That's this movie. And it ruins all the goodwill West earns with the commitment to the style.