{"id":2853,"date":"2009-04-25T21:39:14","date_gmt":"2009-04-26T02:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=2853"},"modified":"2009-08-28T19:04:24","modified_gmt":"2009-08-29T00:04:24","slug":"open-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=2853","title":{"rendered":"Open House"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"open-house1\"There’s a famous poem by Robert Frost that says, and I paraphrase, “two roads diverged, both selling out in their own way, one to Hollywood, and one to direct-to-video erotic thrillers.” Frost wrote this poem after watching Open House<\/em>, a low-budget slasher movie taking place amongst real estate agents, written by David Mickey Evans, who followed up this script with the fantasy\/child abuse uplifting drama, Radio Flyer<\/em> and the nostalgia for racial mixing amongst young baseball players with The Sandlot<\/em>, while director Jag Mundhra followed Open House<\/em> with titles like Sexual Malice, Tropical Heat, <\/em>and most recently, Kama Sutra 3<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Open House <\/em>is like a perfect synthesis of these two styles, featuring both badly staged murders and gratuitous nudity, as well as a too good for this project Hollywood star, Adrienne Barbeau as the lead, who is involved in a horribly unconvincing romantic relationship with a doctor with a radio call-in show, who may or may not have the key to discovering who the serial killer is. The killer’s likes including growling off-screen, collecting severed fingers, and terrifying bimbos trying to sell overpriced property. A subplot that was a precursor to Glengarry Glen Ross<\/em> with scheming, sleazy battles between salespeople, gives us such winning dialogue as “your leads are for the birds!” There’s even a rather original explanation for the motive of the killer, suggesting that there might have been a much smarter movie just underneath the layers of inept, cheap sleaze. But to add brains to a movie like this would be a mistake, its very lack of self-awareness is what gives it its charm. If Open House<\/em> were a better movie, what would we make of the scene where a woman is electrocuted, because the killer poured champagne on her naked breasts? Or that 90% of the dialogue required ADR? Or when a woman discovers the first dead body, she screams so long, that it veers off into humor, and keeps going after that, for probably another 30 seconds.<\/p>\n

\"open-house2\"Barbeau takes the movie rather seriously, which is the only explanation for her nude scene, because her performance is so bad, she had a hard time convincing me she was going for her morning jog, let alone engaging in a relationship with the radio doctor. It’s also pretty difficult to hate a movie where a character drives the strangest looking hybrid imaginable, with what appears to be a Rolls Royce convertible sports car. Tackiness that extreme can’t help but be endearing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a famous poem by Robert Frost that says, and I paraphrase, “two roads diverged, both selling out in their own way, one to Hollywood, and one to direct-to-video erotic thrillers.” Frost wrote this poem after watching Open House, a low-budget slasher movie taking place amongst real estate agents, written by David Mickey Evans, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[5188,1946,3819,2216,3835,2765,144,3828,3824,2461,3067,3605,905,3830,3821,3825,1013,4600,3829,3833,3832,1707,5189,3820,3834,3822,3827,986,43,3826,3831,3658,3823],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2853"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}