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First Cynic Comic Strip
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OPEN HOUSE, a forgotten horror movie
Reviewed by Cartoonist Jeff Swenson
Horror, 1987

  It's one of those lost gems, a horror movie so bad it's good. Starring Joseph Bottoms (who?) as Dr. David Kelley and Adrienne Barbeau (nice tits).

I love bad horror movies, especially from the eighties. The main reason being that I wasn't allowed to watch them as a kid because for one we didn't subscribe to a movie channel that would show R-rated films and two my Dad would have never allowed me to watch such mindless dribble as a slaughter-fest flick with gratuitous nudity.

The only way I was able to watch the original Friday The 13th was because I stayed over at a best friend's apartment. So whenever I check the movie channels I have now and see an eighties slasher film or a monster flick I usually watch it. Even if it's bad. It's like the childhood I never had. When other kids were watching Freddy terrorizing anxiety-prone teens, I was watching The Disney Channel (back when they played actual movies without interruptions) and listening to a radio station that featured old time radio shows like Abbott and Costello and Jack Benny. Very safe entertainment all in all.


As an adult no one can stop me from watching a pointless horror movie, except for my wife who occasionally vetoes my poor choices in favor of some other poor choice of hers like those VH1 shows where comedians make their own worthless commentary about movies.

Open House is not a movie I can recommend. It is a bad, bad horror movie. So bad that you will want your friends with you to watch it so you can make fun of it. I caught it late last night on FLIX, the channel for obscure films including other bad horror films like Chopping Mall. What's the plot? Do you need a plot for a slasher film? Okay, it is actually a nice premise: murder in the real estate market. Real estate agents are being killed during showings of homes-for-sale to potential buyers. The unoriginal part of the plot is that the killer keeps calling into a radio show hosted by a pop psychologist. In the end the psychologist must save his girlfriend who is of course a real estate agent.

One of the first gore scenes lets you know right away how bad this film is going to be. An agent finds a decomposing body in the bathroom and screams her head off for what feels like 10 minutes. That must have been some valuable footage because they kept cutting back and forth from the screaming agent to the worms on the dead body. The sign of a good editor is to know when to cut a scene down and not dwell on a special effects shot just because it was expensive or took a long time to shoot. This scene kept going on and on until you wanted to slap some sense into the woman and grab a mop bucket to clean up the mess.

From there we get to see more killings, some fairly decent nudity and a face-off between Adrienne Barbeau's character and a sleazy, fat, sexist real estate agent who leaves dog food in homes on the market to attract ants and scare away other buyers; that way he can snatch them up for a low price. The real estate market is vicious, I mean affording a home where I live means you have to suck Bill Gate's dick to get some of his extra change. It is high-priced to say the least. A serial killer with house envy makes sense and there's a strong motivation for the killer to want to lash out.

I'll admit there isn't as much blood as I would have liked in Open House, but the bad acting, the stereotypes and horrible dialogue make up for it. The real treat is the ending which I don't want to give away because the killer has one of the funniest lines of the movie. And the killer's death scene is so poorly staged I began to wonder if maybe there wasn't an editor on the film--maybe they just shot each scene and glued them all together without any cutting at all. The police officer kicks the killer in the balls and then backs up for another kick while the killer seems to patiently await his cue to rush forward.

Like I said, I can only recommend this movie if you like movies so bad they're good or if you've been trying to buy a house and everything is out of your price range and you want to see some real estate agents "get theirs". A good time-wasting, popcorn eating, joking with your friends on a Saturday night kind of movie.




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