MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE HOME BELOW
Last night, I got cinematically bamboozled, there’s no other word for it.
So, my local AMC held a Secret Horror Movie Screening on Monday, July 21. Nobody in the audience would know what the film was before those fateful opening logos appeared. I was convinced the screening was for 2025 Sundance sensation Together. After all, this showing's runtime matched Together’s perfectly. Plus, Neon and Bloody Disgusting were hosting word-of-mouth screenings for the film on July 21. Surely this was part of that.
Nope!
As the Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate logos filled the screen, it became clear I and the other moviegoers in that room were not in for Together. Instead, we were watching The Home, a fright-fest starring Pete Davidson from writer/director James DeMonaco (Adam Cantor also penned the script). It was unquestionably a chilling movie, just not remotely in any of its intended ways. At least it functioned as a vivid 95-minute reminder of how those Purge movies finally got good once series creator DeMonaco wasn't directing them.
The Home begins depicting lead character Max (Pete Davidson) just coasting through life as a troublemaker. As excessive, poorly-written flashbacks make clear, he’s still haunted by the loss of his foster brother Luke decades earlier. In the present, Max’s dad remarks “ever since Luke died…” like this happened a few months ago, not nearly two decades earlier. Anyway, Max has taken to being a real rascal. He's smoking weed, covered in tattoos, and spray painting environmentally conscious graffiti on buildings. What a rebel without a cause. After getting arrested for that graffiti, Max is sentenced to work at a local retirement home. This is his "last strike" after previous run-ins with the law.
At this domicile, Max is given lots of duties by boss Dr. Sabian (Bruce Altman) as well as a handful of strict requirements. One of those is to never venture onto the establishment's fourth floor. Once Max does that, he discovers a wing full of elderly souls confined to wheelchairs, howling in immense pain. This and other constant bizarre happenings at his new workplace lead him to believe that something terrible is going on. Now this guy's questioning authority once more and diving into the conspiracies of what's going on in this location.
It's borderline impressive how DeMonaco and Cantor's The Home script is so incompetent at building tension. For one thing, the duo immediately makes the retirement community a weird place where elderly ladies seductively flicker their tongues at Max, and people bleed out of their foreheads during pool aerobics. There's no sense of atmospheric pacing in The Home. What you see is exactly what you get in this project. Great horror movies like Society, both Suspiria's, or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre just get more and more unhinged as their stories progress. The Home, meanwhile, just exists as a horror cinema flat-line from the moment the studio logos end.
Meanwhile, Max's tremendously easy ability to access that "forbidden" fourth floor further undermines internal anxiety. Granted, it's not as devastating to the production as truly wretched instances of ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement, dialogue recorded in post-production). Tahar Rahim's comically bad ADR in Madame Web would be proud of the awkward execution of various Home lines. Too often, security camera footage or other unnerving images are accompanied by an off-screen Pete Davidson either over-explaining what's happening or dropping superfluous observations like, "what the fuck are you doing, old man?"
The Home doesn't trust its audience to understand the simplest visuals, which means the whole film is papered over in amateurishly incorporated ADR'd expository dialogue. It's a byproduct of what this feature's shoddily assembled status. Todd E. Miller's editing, for instance, is incredibly choppy, even when it comes to the most mundane, static conversations. At least his poor visual impulses create one or two instances of unintentionally hilarious comedy. Most notably, there's an ominous Home sequence that immediately cuts to a wide shot of Pete Davidson sullenly using a leaf-blower outside. Swerving right from Z-grade horror to an image of Davidson channeling the energy of an eight-year-old forced to do his chores had me chuckling.
Also generating inadvertent chuckles is the utterly stupid interior politics of The Home. Initially, DeMonaco and Cantor's script has constant references to global warming (including through an extended televised "debate" playing as background audio for one scene) and even features a temporary explanation for the retirement home's evil rooted in U.S. government experimentation. Then, the third act swerves to reveal that this whole story has been about elderly people kidnapping young folks. This way, folks like Dr. Sabian and Lou (John Glover) can extract "nectar" behind these youthful right eyes that keeps them eternally young. So it all devolves into imagining "what if QAnon-adjacent nonsense was real?". Where are all these contradictory political leanings going?
Nowhere! It's just sporadically amusing that The Home invokes the most surface-level versions imaginable of leftist and right-wing friendly talking points. This is such a stupid movie, right down to it only knowing political terms like "global warming" without having any thoughts or commentary to offer on them. It's infuriating that such idiotic cinema gets financing and major theatrical releases, but the staggering incompetence is certainly something to witness. Eventually, all those references to 2020s political matters dissipate for the only reason anyone will talk about The Home. For the film's final eight minutes, Max is restored to health through the youthful eye nectar of other fourth-floor patients. Then, he grabs an axe and hammer and proceeds to viciously slaughter all the evil retirement home employees and residents.
Did you ever watch Oldboy's hallway fight scene and wish Choi Min-sik was played instead by Pete Davidson? For that one weirdo out there, The Home is your must-see movie. The sight of Chad from Saturday Night Live drenched head-to-toe in blood snapping elderly bones is certainly a commendably "WTF" sight. Unfortunately, even this set piece reflects The Home's failure as a movie. After all, there's just not much tension in whether or not Pete Davidson can beat up Lex Luthor's dad from Smallville. Opting for a tidy, happy ending, meanwhile, is just another cop-out in a film full of wasted potential.
The antithesis to quality, frightening horror cinema, The Home will become infamous among scary film aficionados for being humorously bad (oh God, I didn't even bring up the exposition-laden "secret room" in Max's childhood home that contains a shrine to the Goddess of youth). Even in that regard, though, this is no Assassin 33 A.D. or Birdemic in the realm of constantly hysterical subpar genre fare. The Home turgidly vomits back up jump scares, plot points, and visuals (including DeMonaco's love for kooky masks from The Purge) from infinitely superior chilling motion pictures. It's an insultingly bad enterprise that would've gotten on my nerves even if I hadn't had my hopes of seeing Together early dashed.