Havenhurst seems like the nicest halfway house ever. But
***SPOILER ALERT*** it’s really one of the meanest!
In his review, my friend Paul covered the general plot of
Havenhurst and also pointed out that it’s a pretty good movie (in the context
of the worst-ever movies we generally cover). I will really briefly also cover
the plot, and then dive into the two things I actually want to talk about:
- The protagonist’s investigative drinking
- The creepy guy who lives under the trap doors
So, the general plot is this: Jackie and Danielle became
friends in rehab. When Danielle vanished, Jackie investigated the last place she
was seen: Havenhurst. Which was pretty convenient because Havenhurst is where fresh-out-of-rehab
alcoholics live rent free, and Jackie just happened to qualify. She even got to
live in Danielle's old room!
But there’s a catch! If you relapse at Havenhurst, you’ll
fall through a trap door into a dungeon where a creepy guy will rip your guts
out.
That’s a pretty simple premise, but the movie seemed to
promise a lot more in the early going. The hotel itself is kind of a puzzle box
and the atmosphere pulses with unseen evil.
But alas, the thrill of the movie is largely undermined when
Jackie says “Screw it, I’ll drink this bottle of whiskey and see where that
takes me.” Based on what you’ve seen previously in Havenhurst, she should fall
through a trap door and get disemboweled. But, she doesn’t. Instead, she sleeps
through the night and then investigates the laundry room with the help of the little
neighbor girl and finds a hidden door that leads to the Room of Evidence that
Havenhurst is Evil.
When you consider that the alcohol didn’t help her find the
evidence room, Jackie’s drinking seems pretty asinine. What makes it even worse
is the fact that she got drunk the SAME night she offered to take care of the
little neighbor girl, Sarah, who had just survived a brutal rape attempt. I get
it, children make you want to drink. Mine certainly do. And so did Jackie’s, as
shown in a flashback scene where she drunkenly fails to cook dinner for her daughter. This is the second worst type of drunken cooking.
But Jackie wasn’t drinking to relieve the pressure of
parental responsibility. She drank to find out what happened to people who
drank at Havenhurst – she heard them screaming as they disappeared, but what
were the actual consequences? Only one way to find out, right?
Actually, Jackie was uniquely educated in the screaming consequences
of compulsive drinking. The whole reason she went to rehab in the first place was because she drove
drunk with her actual daughter in the car, crashed, and her daughter died in
the ensuing fire. Which, by the way, is the third worst type of drunken cooking. Wait, or is it the first? Damn you, drunken writing!
Anyway, upon being entrusted with the care of another child, Jackie
immediately got drunk as part of her investigation into the consequences of
drinking.
Like I said earlier, Jackie should have fallen through a
trap door and gotten disemboweled. But where was the freaking trap door
operator? He had ONE JOB.
Speaking of the trap door operator, he is generally able to
be everywhere all the time because he uses Havenhurst’s trap doors like
teleporters. He’s like that annoying Mortal Kombat character,
Quan’Chi, who can just drop on peoples’ heads from off-screen anytime he wants.
Here he is literally getting the drop on Jackie:
His physical appearance is pretty incongruous with the rest of the movie.
The first thing that jumps out at you, after he jumps out at you, is the fact that he's really pale.
I get it, he
doesn’t get out much. He lives in walls. He’s pale. But what’s with the weird
harness and the metal looking…
Oh my god. The bad guy IS Quan Chi.
You really can get anybody to be in these
straight-to-Netflix horror movies.
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