Home Sweet Home

*

• Thanksgiving slasher.
• Directed by a woman early in the slasher cycle.
• Charming "fitness instructor to the 80s stars" Jake 'Body by Jake' Steinberg before his stardom and inspiring personality pretty much denounces and disregards this film which casts him as a psycho.
• One of the characters is actually named Mistake (I kid you not!), looks like a mime, with white face paint (I think he is meant to represent a card carrying member of the KISS army), carries around a guitar on his shoulder and an amp in his backpack, and purposely interrupts folks while they are making out. Oh, and he does magic tricks.

• Jake is a lunatic who injects PCP into his tongue through the use of a hyperdermic and escaped from an asylum. The slasher genre simply loves to use this over and over. Prom Night (1980) actually used this as a diversion subplot and Home Sweet Home goes all in with it. It is lazy and easy but this was 1981 so it wasn't altogether tired.
• Jake strangles a drunk, takes his station wagon, and runs right through a little old lady who dropped her groceries on a crosswalk!
• Later Jake lifts a lady in a bench press and hurtles her right into a boulder, with her head oozing blood!

• The plot is quite basic: family and friends (and lodgers, with their lovers) gather for Thanksgiving at a ranch house outside LA and lurking in the forest and shadows is this deranged drug freak wanting to punish women because they remind him of his mother. Yes, leave no classic trope alone. It's there so why not steal it for your film?
• Lots of Jake behind the wheel. I am not sure the slasher film does itself any favors spending so much time with their killers. But when films like this have equally unappealing casts of victims for the body count, spending time with them isn't worth it, either. Especially if it is a football game gambler gnawing on a cigar or his hot Mamacita who rips off an acoustic guitar tune seemingly for no apparent reason. It isn't that they aren't likable or toxically repellent, but disposable and underwhelming. Included is a tenant and his sweet blond lovely who wind up the remaining members of the Thanksgiving party not yet obliterated.
• Some might think of Madman (1982) in regards to an early kill involving a car hood. It is actually an effective kill, savage and startling for the poor guy working on getting it started.
• Off goes the lights. Jake will also take care of the secondary source of electricity and the film's best scene involves Mistake and his fucking guitar.
• The film is cast with some well endowed eye candy, but this film doesn't worry with them naked. Minor making out lead nowhere thanks to that stooge, Mistake.

• I thought to myself: how much of a bummer must it be to get offed early on in this slasher, realizing that this was as close to a noteworthy part you might ever have?
• Speaking of the cast, not one performance escapes mediocrity. Not one part reaches out and grabs your attention. Besides Jake, who quite frankly is so overripe it reaches epic proportions because no one told him he might ought to reign it in a little, you have the oddball Mistake just irritating everyone to the point he is chased around the ranch and inside the ranch house by folks wanting to seriously hurt him. Vinessa Shaw (of the remake of Hills Have Eyes) is noted in her debut as a little girl, shown in one scene under a table munching on turkey (!), while the rest are either only in Home Sweet Home or in bits on 80s television.
• One of my internet review buddies said that Jake “chortles” which made me smile inside. That’s exactly what Jake does. He flexes his muscles, twists his face into a raged expression when he isn’t cackling or cartoonishly mimicking a Machiavellian villain, and goes all ‘roid crazy as any muscled gym freak is portrayed as maniacs in these 80s movies. Jake is a slasher cartoon. He alone just might lift this film out of the rental shelf filler doldrums
•  In the late 80s/early 90s, Home Sweet Home was among those slasher films, like The Forest or Prey that filled the shelves and admittedly got a chance to entertain me. I forked over my two bucks for the VHS. In fact, this film was a VHS rip that was reminded me of the copy I watched way back in the day. You can probably find it on YouTube these days, so it is possible to add this to your Thanksgiving list, but why bother? Honestly, as I was watching it, this feeling from the past remerged once again…it is just plain lousy. It is bad-to-poor in almost every possible way, from its casting, to its underwhelming off-screen violence, to its execution. It looks cheap, and the lack of effects for yet another slasher made on canned beans and Ramon noodles budget doesn’t help matters.
• The slasher genre really does (it hasn’t totally ended but I guess we’re at that cycle where the steam is puttering) lend itself as a path for filmmakers with little money to put out there a film, made with next to nothing. That can often, however, produce turkeys (appropriate for the holiday, so I leave it here) like Home Sweet Home. It could still perhaps garner some type of cult curiosity status considering Jake and Mistake (like how I did that?).