I am late getting around to watching comedy horror film eVil Sublet (written, edited and directed by Allan Piper) and I really can't blame anyone but myself for this tardiness. The title of the movie by the way is a reference to the sublet being part of east village. By a stroke of luck I woke up this morning feeling terrible, my whole body aches and I keep coughing (at the time of typing). That is admittedly not the best time to be watching a film for review, hopefully it wont colour my judgement of this fun but long comedy horror.
Reena (Sally Struthers - Gilmore Girls TV show) and her husband Ben (Charley Tucker) think they have struck gold when they discover an apartment in New York that is not only huge, but is also affordable. Unfortunately, as the estate agent informs them, the apartment has a dark history, with all former tenants at the place either dying in gruesome circumstances or fleeing in terror shortly after moving in. While Ben downplays the danger of the place, Reena gets increasingly freaked out by the ghostly goings on. With her husband away on business, she decides to look into the history of the place, discovering along the way that for each new tenant at the property, three lives will be claimed.
A big shout out to the apartment featured here as it is full of detail and life. My own house I see as a reflection of myself, I got a similar vibe here with the intricately decorated rooms. I liked the idea that the house is a mishmash of decoration styles, each new tenant adding to the décor but not getting around to redecorating fully. Sure, that also made it seem a bit weird that a couple would move into a new place and leave nearly every picture and piece of furniture intact, but it gave the house a feeling of malice. It is ghosts doing the haunting, but the home takes on a feel of its own. This tries to be very comedic, but regardless of that, this still has moments of genuine horror that wouldn't look out of place in a serious horror with a little tweaking. One of the key ghosts (a figure dressed in Victorian England style black clothes and wearing a paper-mache smiling head) looked effectively creepy, and there was a later staircase kill that felt like something out of a Hitchcock movie.
The humour verged on the weird more than the funny, but at least sex and bodily function jokes were kept to a minimum. A lot of the humour comes from dialogue, such as when a character is being attacked by a poltergeist and loudly exclaims something along the lines of "I'm sh*tting myself! I'm actually sh*tting myself!", there are plenty of dead pan moments also, such as with the estate agent discussing the dark history of the apartment, but Reena only picking up on the fact the apartment has a garden included with it. There are physical moments of humour used also, but like the verbal jokes these were a bit hit and miss. I didn't particularly find even the better jokes to be that funny, but did appreciate the weird and surreal vibe.
My biggest issue was that the one hour forty five minute runtime did feel every second of that length. The plot kind of got stuck in a holding pattern for a large chunk of the middle part of the movie. I couldn't help but feel it would have benefitted by being trimmed down slightly.
My biggest issue was that the one hour forty five minute runtime did feel every second of that length. The plot kind of got stuck in a holding pattern for a large chunk of the middle part of the movie. I couldn't help but feel it would have benefitted by being trimmed down slightly.
eVil Sublet had some decent moments of horror that delighted. If the humour had been more appealing and matched the inventiveness of the horror, and if this had been a bit shorter than I would have enjoyed this more than I did. I also would have if I hadn't been feeling so rotten at the time of watching for review however. eVil Sublet released on demand on October 1st.
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