House of Spoils
House of Spoils
The only flaw of the Amazon Blumhouse originals is that they do not take risks. Their latest one entitled “House of Spoils” and made by the lovely duo of “Blow the Man Down” seems to be just another crownless lion in this blockbuster’s jungle of half-baked projects. It remains idling in the same place, another horror film that promises plenty of strange, strong and freaky surprises, but in the long run chooses the valley of dullness. It is a film about the raw instincts of women and a woman’s relationship with Mother Nature so it has to be dirty, rough and mystical. It is simply not these enough, which leads to situations like Oscar winner Ariana DeBose being trapped in a movie that appears to undergo some sort of identity crisis, transitioning from a jump scare horror movie to what appears undeserving in the last part. Jason Blum is definitely an underrated but a very real ‘force’ in the industry but I do wish that he would be less conservative and let his cooks make more adventurous horror films.
Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy are the authors of “House of Spoils” plus the films also, about a head cook (DeBose) who is in a notable restaurant for seven years now and is being mentored by a well – known talent called Marcello (Mason, one can say he has little to do yet he covers a lot). He is so impressed by her talents that when she tells him of her company, he persuades her to stay and agrees to increase her salary, but alas, the woman wants to go it alone. They fly off planning to build a rather extreme restaurant with one of their investors being a grumpy man, Andres (Arian Moayed); a ‘Destination Restaurant’ centralized at a place where people would even drive for hours to go to the restaurant. Here they are doing that on what is almost like a remote haunted house. That will go off without a hitch.
The previously unnamed chef of DeBose settles in the rickety house, and this is where everything begins to go wrong. There are some food items which she begins to notice bugs, and others which are rotten and look heavily spoiled. She hears noises in the dark, various sounds that are not present in the daytime, and she sees movement of shadows but with sad reality, Cole and Krudy don’t infuse enough ambiance to this segment to make it work. “House of Spoils” is supposed to be genuinely horrifying, an intriguing concept of how ‘a dream job’ of some abnormal pressure combined with paranormal activity falls short of convincing either way. We come to the conclusion that either the occupation or the torturing spirit does not quite pose a threat to one.
Not long after that, our chef takes in a garden that she finds buried somewhere on the estate and starts opening her mind and the menu. This would be the best notion in Cole and Krudy’s script, after all, who would have thought that the high style of cooking has become more and more detached from the original because the earth has to feed you? The climax of the ‘House of Spoils’, when the chef and her assistant Lucia (Barbie Ferreira) create a menu with textures and tastes that would be hard to imagine, is undoubtedly the best in the film.
This is where the drama comes to the fact that “House of Spoils” tends to forget that it is an October horror film but feels rather embarrassed about it. It is a film that is supposed to go weird but is as chicken as a chef without cutlery. . And it’s what leaves DeBose hanging. Some people have even gone far to suggest that she is over acting in her part, which is over inflating her performance because most of the other actors are not at ‘the’ register that Elizabeth is at such that it appears overdone because of the lack of films drama around her.
At one point in the movie, there is a scene where one restaurant critic (Amara Karan) shatters our heroine’s dreams by saying your food has no risk, no worth, no feeling. I wouldn’t go quite so far in outlining ‘House of Spoils’ as that, but such an interesting feature of the film is how it takes on the creative power’s block, or rather the unwillingness to take any chances, in this case for the film itself.
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- Genre: horror, Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: Bridget Savage Cole, Danielle Krudy
- Cast: Ariana DeBose, Barbie Ferreira, Steven Seagal, Marton Csokas
