Sweet Home (Spain, 2015)
Rating: ***
Starring: Ingrid García Jonsson, Bruno Sevilla, Oriol Tarrida Homedes
Apparently in Spain, there's a phenomenon wherein the elderly are forcibly removed from their homes by shady real estate with plans of using the space to build apartments. Now whether they use the same methods in this slasher/thriller hybrid or not is something I cannot conclusively tell, but I sure hope they don't!
Alicia (Ingrid García Jonsson) is a real estate broker who, after inspecting a nearly abandoned building for a company, decided to use it as a secret rendezvous for her English boyfriend Simon's (Bruno Sevilla) birthday later that rainy evening. They eat Japanese food, have sex, Simon gets pissy at Alicia for getting him a birthday gift coz it'll make him feel guilty of not getting her anything back (...wait, what?), unbeknownst to them both that the company eyeing the building has sent goons to finish off the last tenant living there. When Alicia and Simon sees the result of these killer's handiwork and fail to hide themselves away, their night becomes one long cat-and-mouse chase which gets worse once a hulking slasher dubbed
El Liquidador gets called-in to help clean up the mess.
A melting pot of home invasion thrills and hack-and-slash slasher spills,
Sweet Home (2015) mostly passes as a fast-paced stroll through horror clichés, tainted with bad decisions and brutal bloodlettings. The story is straightforward for what it is, one long hide-and-seek session with stalking and killings, though its direction can get clunky given the number of times our protagonists could have escaped, only to get those chances botched by not only the killers but also by
themselves. The action set-pieces and the bloody murders do make up for most of the horror trope-related dumbness though, enough to give blood and gore hounds a bout of satisfaction, especially by the time
El Liquidador arrives with an axe and cases of liquid nitrogen at hand. (
Jason X (2001),
Mindhunters (2004) and now this? Gotta love liquid nitrogen!)
Production-wise,
Sweet Home (2015) is simply eye-candy. The film is rich in amazing camera work and the abandoned building setting's just gorgeous, utilizing so many crevices, hidden rooms and tight spots to hide in and be stalked at that works quite well with the tension-building scenes. The talents involved are mostly alright with their acting roles, with Jonsson and Sevilla taking up a good streak of onscreen presence as our doomed couple who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, while the rest do away their best movie bad guy thug and silent axe murderer impressions. (As in talk mean, look mean and act mean)
There's not really a lot more to say about this movie. Sweet Home (2015) is foreign B-flick horror in its purest form, and, yes, the story could have done more to raise itself from being a mediocre run of horror and thriller trappings, but for what it is offering right now, it couldn't have done worse. Way worse.
Bodycount:
1 elderly female slips in a bath tub
1 elderly male found murdered, cause unknown
1 male topples down a flight of stairs, killed
1 male repeatedly stabbed in the neck with a calligraphy pen
1 male dismembered with an axe
1 male had his head crushed with a thrown elevator motor
1 male gets a cable tie tightened around his neck, axed on the head
Total: 7
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