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#31 - Housebound
Gerard Johnstone, 2014


A young woman is put on house arrest in her dilapidated childhood home but soon starts to suspect that there is something weird going on inside the house.

I'm always more than a little skeptical of horror-comedy, if only because it's already hard enough to get just one of those genres right that trying to pull off a good balancing act between the two is always a challenge. I've avoided them almost completely this October, with the closest I've gotten before this being a couple of the later Nightmare on Elm Street sequels that lean really hard into Freddy Krueger's twisted sense of humour. I decided to make an exception for Housebound, a New Zealand-based horror-comedy that sees protagonist Kylie botch an ATM heist and end up being sentenced to house arrest with her mum and stepdad in the childhood home she couldn't wait to ditch. Of course, she's annoyed at the whole situation as she has to contend with the boredom of being stuck in a house with not just her extremely chipper mother and silently standoffish stepfather but also the fact that the officer keeping track of her movements lives in the neighbourhood (and that's without mentioning the bad TV reception or dialup Internet). Things start to take a turn for the spooky when Kylie starts hearing strange noises coming from within the walls that escalate into increasingly creepy occurrences, spurring the otherwise jaded youth into action.

The quirky New Zealand humour takes some getting used to but becomes pleasantly familiar before too long as it builds a good handful of characters, especially when it comes to making you invested in a protagonist that could have been far too easy to hate. It handles its haunted house mystery rather well, teasing out all sorts of weird happenings and troubling theories about what's really causing these bizarre phenomena while still ultimately grounding it in issues that affect the characters on deeper levels. The complicated dynamic between Kylie and her mother definitely gives the film the substance it needs to sell its zanier (and more directly horrific) moments such as a talking teddy bear or a potentially murderous neighbour, and that's before it ramps up into the kind of frantic and bloody climax one would understandably expect from a film of this nature. Housebound isn't a great film, but I found it to be a decent hybrid of horror and comedy that doesn't embarrass itself on either front, and that alone should come as a high recommendation to anyone who wants to watch a horror-comedy.