House Arrest

I'm always trying to find good supernatural horror movies for Ms. Spenser. I had one pretty far down in the queue, a left-over from Spooktober: Housebound (2014). Somehow it bubbled up and we're glad it did, even though it turned out to be a horror comedy.

It starts with Morgana O'Reilly and some knucklehead trying to rob an ATM and getting busted. Since O'Reilly had been sent to various rehabs over the years, she is given house arrest with her mother, Rima Te Waita (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) and silent stepfather. Mum is cheery and dim, and O'Reilly is sullen and bratty, also messy and obnoxious.

She hears a radio psychic call-in show where a woman who sounds like Te Waita describing her house as haunted. O'Reilly figures that her mom set that up to scare her out of the house. But her mother insists that it's true. When O'Reilly explores the basement, a figure covered in a ragged sheet attacks her - turns out to be a 3/4 scale statue of Jesus that just fell over. Cute scare. Then a creepy hand reaches out from under a workbenh to grab her. 

Since one edge of the basement seems to be out-of-bounds for her monitoring anklet, the private security guy in charge keeping her home shows up. When Te Waita mentions the haunting, he immediately gets out his ghosthunting gear. O'Reilly still insists there's an intruder, but they can't find one.

It turns out that the house used to be a halfway house for troubled teens and the site of the horrific murder of one of them. O'Reilly finds a dental bridge in the furnace and begins to suspect their gross neighbor, a scuzzy, possum-skinning, NZ hillbilly. But when he catches her and the security guy trying to break in to get evidence, he catches them. He tells them it was probably Eugene, a weird kid at the house who disappeared before the murder.

So our friends are now trying to solve the murder to lay the ghost. Mum Te Waita is sort of blase about the whole thing - it's just a haunting. Security guy (Glen-Paul Waru, who has a kind of a Dave Bautista look and vibe) takes it seriously and logically. And O'Reilly is still a rude brat, alternately scathing and sarcastic and frightened out of her wits. She even panics and stabs her stepdad, thinking he's the intruder.

We were a little worried about the lack of likable characters for a while, but got into the humor of it all. This has more than a little resemblance to Wilderpeople and even What We Do in the Shadows. The same mix of the mundane and the horrible, the same dry style. I guess that's New Zealand for you.

For an added bonus, look for Cameron Rhodes from Deathgasm.