Christopher Denham's Home Movie Is a Creepy, Disturbing Gem!

Here’s the deal: A while back I kept hearing through the grapevine about a creepy indie movie called Home Movie. The writer/director is Christopher Denham, an actor I’m a huge fan of -- I still remember his electrifying performance in Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter. The movie is a little The Blair Witch Project in the fact it’s family home movies of the Poe family. Dad David (Adrien Pasdar), a Lutheran minister, gets a new video camera and starts recording family holidays with wife Clare (Cady McClain) and their cute but sullen children Jack (Austin Williams) and Emily (Amber Hoy Williams). The mom is a child psychiatrist but is oblivious to the signs in her own kids. They talk in a secret language. They sleep in the same bed. They have a private clubhouse that is off limits to their parents. Dad films him and his son playing ball until he realizes the boy is throwing rocks at him. While teaching his son how to tie knots in the shed, little Emily is killing a frog in a vice. And on Christmas they find the pet cat crucified upstairs. The parents, realizing the kids are not alright, try medication, even exorcism, but things go from bad to worse.

The film is beautifully constructed. You watch with building dread as the situation escalates. And the kids are terrific: deadpan, furtive and lethal. Pasdar (Heroes, Near Dark) is goofy, annoying and heartbreaking all at once as the dad, and McClain (All My Children) is really touching as the mom who struggles to turn the situation around.

Of course, tracking this movie down was daunting. I read a feature on the film in Fangoria magazine, which said it was going to come out on DVD as an exclusive from Blockbusteron Feb. 24th, so I raced to the store and discovered you couldn’t buy the film -- it was only for rental. So I quickly became a Blockbuster member and raced home to watch the movie. It did not disappoint. It’s a chilling, disturbing gem, and you should all run out and rent this shocker immediately.