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Sunday, May 30, 2010

BD impressions: The House of the Devil

4:44 PM / BD Impressions / 6 Comments

Thought for the day: mobile phones ruined horror movies. Discuss.

Even if you don't like THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, you've got to give writer/director Ti West one thing: he pulled off the 80s look more or less perfectly, getting not just the fashion, hairstyles and vehicles right but also the colour palette, film stock and lighting. Better still, it's not simply a nostalgia piece. West and his crew were clearly big fans of 80s horror movies and they do everything they can evoke their mood and feel, but it's not done in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "we're sooooo 80s" way. Instead, the film takes itself seriously, which goes a long way towards the audience extending it the same courtesy.

There's not actually a whole lot on paper, and to be honest I think West does at times overestimate his audience's stomach for watching his heroine wandering around an empty old house opening doors and peeking into crannies. THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL takes a very long time indeed to actually get anywhere, and while I wouldn't say I was bored - West's highly attuned sense for style and atmosphere, and Jessica Harper dead ringer Jocelin Donahue's engaging and natural screen presence, put paid to that - I did find myself thinking "I hope this is worth it" on quite a few occasions. And is it? Well, sort of. In the final act, the pace and tone of the film change drastically, with more actually happening in the final 15 minutes than in the first 75 combined. It feels a tad anticlimactic, though. There's no big reveal, and in essence exactly what you thought was going on WAS going on.

I liked THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL rather more than this review probably suggests. There's not a whole lot to it, but what there IS is consistently well-made and laced with the sort of atmosphere that most twenty-first century horror films would kill for. If you have any affection for the slasher movie output of the period it sets out to ape, you definitely owe it to yourself to give it a look.

Image quality: A difficult one, this - not just to review, but to encode in the first place. THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL was, true to its low budget 80s aspirations, shot on 16mm and is grainy even by those standards. This is not always particularly well-handled by the encoder, despite the relatively healthy bit rate. Artefacting is evident more or less throughout, to varying degrees of intensity, and the darker scenes do on occasion reveal some very nasty blocking indeed - see the left-hand side of Example 18. This is in spite of what looks to me like the filtering of high frequency detail - check out the ringing visible at the top of the frame.

I've seen threads about the film on various message boards where people have actually questioned the point of buying such a deliberately grungy-looking film on BD, and I have to say I find these debates to be spurious. Of course THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL was never going to be a looker, but the experience is vastly more authentic on BD than standard definition could ever offer... although, that said, those who REALLY want to recapture the feeling of watching an 80s horror movie at home may wish to wheel out the CRT television and pick up a copy of the specially-produced VHS version (the first film to be released on that format since Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE in 2006). 7/10

The House of the Devil
studio: Metrodome; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 21.2 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 32 Mbit/sec

6 Comments

 
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